There are several ways in which to apportion the family income, all of them unsatisfactory.

Benchley’s joke turns a domestic truism—budgeting—into a deadpan paradox: there are “several ways” to divide income, yet none will satisfy everyone involved. The line satirizes the perennial tension between finite resources and infinite wants, especially within a household where needs, pleasures, and obligations compete. By presenting dissatisfaction as the universal outcome regardless of method, the quip also pokes fun at the false promise of rational systems (budgets, categories, rules) to solve fundamentally human conflicts. The humor depends on understatement and inevitability: the problem isn’t a lack of options, but the nature of money and family expectations.