May all your troubles last as long as your New Year's resolutions.

Joey Adams, a nightclub comedian and aphorist known for one-line jokes and toast-like quips, circulated many seasonal wisecracks in the mid-to-late 20th century through performances, joke columns, and quotation anthologies. This line is framed as a New Year’s greeting that plays on the familiar experience of making resolutions on January 1 and abandoning them soon after. It belongs to the tradition of comic “blessings” and mock-benedictions used in holiday banter—wishing someone well by invoking a shared cultural ritual (New Year’s resolutions) and undercutting it with a punchline about human inconsistency.

A wry New Year’s benediction, the line turns a familiar cultural ritual—making resolutions and quickly abandoning them—into a comic wish. On the surface it sounds sympathetic (“may your troubles last”), but the punchline reverses it: if troubles endure only as long as most resolutions, they will vanish almost immediately. The humor depends on shared self-knowledge about human inconsistency and the gap between aspiration and follow-through. At the same time, it offers a gentle, non-moralizing consolation: setbacks and anxieties can be as temporary as our fleeting bursts of determination, and the new year’s promise lies less in perfect self-reform than in the hope that difficulties, too, will pass.