I walked into a store and said, "It's my wife's birthday. I'd like to buy her a beautiful pen." The clerk winked at me and said, "A little surprise, heh?" I said, "Yes, she's expecting a Cadillac."

This is a classic Henny Youngman one-liner from his nightclub/television stand-up repertoire, built around the familiar “buying a gift for my wife” setup that he used frequently. The joke plays on mid‑century American consumer expectations—especially the Cadillac as a shorthand for an extravagant, status-signaling present—contrasted with the modest “beautiful pen.” Youngman’s stage persona often leaned on quick, self-contained gags about marriage, money, and domestic bargaining, delivered as if recounting an everyday errand. While widely circulated in joke collections and quotation anthologies, it is typically presented without a precise date or single definitive first performance context.

In this one-liner, Youngman plays on the familiar “birthday gift” setup and then flips it with an absurd escalation. The clerk assumes the pen is the “surprise,” but the speaker reveals the real surprise is that his wife expects something vastly more expensive—a Cadillac—making the pen comically inadequate. The humor depends on misdirection, deadpan delivery, and the stereotype of marital gift expectations: the husband frames himself as thoughtful while simultaneously admitting he is under-delivering relative to what his wife anticipates. It’s also a compact example of Youngman’s persona—self-deprecating, marriage-focused, and built around quick reversals that expose everyday anxieties about money and relationships.