The older you get, the higher you wear your underwear. Like rings on a tree. Eighty, ninety years old, your breasts are inside them. When you die, they just pull them up over your head.

The speaker uses bawdy, hyperbolic humor to describe aging as a gradual “upward creep” of the body and its garments—an earthy way of acknowledging physical change, loss of firmness, and the indignities that can accompany old age. The comparison to “rings on a tree” suggests time accumulating in visible layers, marking the body the way years mark wood. The final image—underwear pulled up over the head at death—pushes the joke into gallows humor, turning mortality into a punchline. The effect is both comic and defiant: it punctures sentimental narratives of aging by insisting on the body’s material reality.