Italians come to ruin most generally in three ways, women, gambling, and farming. My family chose the slowest one.

The line is a self-deprecating joke built on a proverbial triad of “ruinous” Italian temptations—women, gambling, and farming—then undercut by the punchline that his own family chose the “slowest” path to hardship: agriculture. Read this way, it signals affection for humble rural origins and a wry awareness that farming can be an economically precarious life, not a moral failing. The humor also works rhetorically: by placing himself among ordinary people and treating poverty as a shared, almost folkloric experience, the speaker cultivates approachability and pastoral empathy rather than clerical distance.