My wife's an earth sign. I'm a water sign. Together we make mud.

Henny Youngman (1906–1998) was a vaudeville-trained stand-up best known for rapid-fire one-liners, especially jokes about marriage and domestic life. This quip draws on popular, mid-to-late 20th-century American familiarity with astrology (sun signs and the four classical elements). Youngman’s stage persona often treated marriage as a comic battleground, and he frequently used contemporary fads as setups for punchlines. Here, he riffs on the astrological idea that “earth” and “water” signs are compatible by literalizing the elemental pairing into an unromantic, messy result—“mud”—turning a would-be romantic compatibility claim into a deflationary marital joke.

The joke hinges on a double move: it borrows astrology’s language of elemental “signs” and compatibility, then collapses the metaphor into physical reality. If earth plus water is supposed to suggest harmony and fertility, Youngman’s punchline reframes it as mere mess, implying that even supposedly “compatible” matches can produce friction, inconvenience, or disappointment. It also fits his broader comedic theme that marriage is less an idealized union than an everyday entanglement. The line works because it is compact, culturally legible (earth/water = mud), and gently cynical—mocking both astrological determinism and romantic expectations at once.