Married men live longer than single men. But married men are a lot more willing to die.

In this one-liner, Carson plays on a familiar statistical claim—marriage correlates with longevity—then undercuts it with a darkly comic twist. The joke hinges on the contrast between “live longer” (a sober, quasi-scientific generalization) and “willing to die” (a hyperbolic expression of marital exasperation). It exemplifies Carson’s late-night persona: genial, observational, and willing to flirt with taboo subjects (domestic frustration, mortality) without becoming overtly cruel. The humor also reflects a mid-to-late 20th-century stand-up tradition in which marriage is framed as both stabilizing and constraining, turning a social institution into a source of everyday comic tension.