Dry Humor Stirred by Gin on the Shopping List

A reader who signs his name but identifies himself only as a husband, writes to me as follows:

“Just as you doubt that they’ll ever be able to make a computer sophisticated enough to recognize the humor in ‘Take my wife. Please,’ so I doubt the same thing about a shopping list my wife handed me a while back. Everybody I’ve shown it to chuckles; some even laugh out loud. Why, I don’t know; but here it is:

Carrots

Dog biscuits

Gin”

I’m not sure why that list is funny; but it’s loaded with implications, some of which might inspire laughter, especially in husbands. In any case, I have decided not to use my correspondent’s name, since his wife may not think it’s so funny.

At first glance, the shopping list seems too short to require a special shopping trip. Certainly carrots aren’t that essential, not even to a vegetarian. Personally, I wouldn’t care if my wife never bought carrots.

On the other hand, if the woman was out of dog biscuits, and had nothing else to feed her dog, ordinary compassion required her to lay in something for him.

This shows that the wife in question was at least thoughtful about her dog; but we cannot assume that because a woman is solicitous of her dog she would also be solicitous of her husband.

The clue to this puzzle seems to me to lie in the third item. Assuming that she could do without carrots and that her dog was not entirely without food, why would she send her husband to the store just to buy gin?

Appearing as it does on such a skimpy list, the gin perhaps takes on more importance than it deserves. We are inclined to wonder, perhaps unfairly, whether the woman drinks more gin than is good for her, and was faced with the disheartening specter of an empty bottle.

However, it seems certain that her husband would have foreseen that implication, and thus have thought better about disclosing her list to friends and to a newspaper. I myself am obliged to assume that his wife’s temperence is beyond question.

On the other hand, it does not seem likely that his wife would have needed the gin for cooking. While wines and spirits are indeed required for many recipes, I do not know of one that requires gin. Gin is a spirit whose only purpose is to get one intoxicated as quickly as possible.

Since chivalry forces us to assume that this wife is not a tippler, and common sense that she did not need the gin for cooking, only two possible answers remain: either this poor woman’s dog is a gin drinker, or her husband is.

Now needing a bottle of gin does not necessarily imply that anyone in the household is inclined to drink too much. Even a moderate drinker can run out of gin, and consequently miss his daily martini.

If my wife were to write such a list, and leave it lying about where I could find it, I would have to assume that I was going to get carrots again for dinner that night, that we were out of dog food, and that either my wife had taken to drinking gin or we were going to have a gin-drinking guest for dinner. I no longer drink hard liquor. My wife, when she does, drinks vodka.

But obviously a wife’s shopping list can reveal much about a husband and wife. My own wife’s shopping list would not very likely be so short. It would probably include carrots, as well as asparagus, artichokes and string beans, none of which I like. Most likely, if we were to dine at home that night, it would have at least two microwave dinners on it.

Although we both drink wine, her list would not include wine, because I happen to be an enlightened husband who believes in sharing the chores, including shopping. I buy the wine.

I hope that this man’s wife does not think I am playing into her husband’s hands by publishing his note. It is evident that he has already shown the note to their friends. I am merely trying to save her from the embarrassing inferences that might be made from it.

However, if I were she, I would try to get my husband and my dog off gin.