Retirement: It's nice to get out of the rat race, but you have to learn to get along with less cheese.

Gene Perret (1937–2022) was an American comedy writer known for television variety shows and for crafting one-line observations that turn everyday situations into punchlines. This quip belongs to a late-20th-century/early-21st-century strain of American humor about work, consumerism, and the anxieties of aging—especially the cultural ideal of “escaping the rat race” versus the financial realities of fixed income. Perret’s joke plays on the familiar mouse-and-cheese imagery attached to the “rat race” metaphor, using it to frame retirement not as pure leisure but as a trade-off: freedom from work pressures often comes with reduced spending power.

The line satirizes the romantic promise of retirement. “Getting out of the rat race” suggests liberation from relentless competition, deadlines, and status-seeking, but the punchline—“less cheese”—recasts that liberation as a budget constraint. The humor depends on a double metaphor: workers are like rats chasing “cheese” (money, perks, advancement), and retirement removes the chase but also shrinks the reward. Implicitly, the quote comments on how modern identity and comfort are tied to income, and it hints that successful retirement requires psychological adjustment as much as financial planning: learning contentment with simpler pleasures and fewer material rewards.