This is a formula joke, not a line someone coined at a party. Quote Investigator ↗ finds it in the New York Times in 1901, where a henpecked husband told his wife is “outspoken” replies “By whom?” It recurs in a Sally’s Sallies comic strip in 1929 and in Punch in 1934, always with a different target. The Dorothy Parker version — aimed at a hostess — first appears in a Bennett Cerf collection in 1944, and QI’s verdict is careful: “Dorothy Parker may have uttered the witticism, but it was in circulation before she was famous for being clever.” Ann Landers used it in her column in 1969.
“Our Host Certainly Is Outspoken" "Outspoken By Whom?” Anonymous — earliest known appearance in The New York Times, 1901. Not Ann Landers, who used it in 1969, and not securely Dorothy Parker, first credited in 1944 · Verbatim: “Minnick—Well, there was one thing I remarked about your wife the first time I saw her; she was undoubtedly outspoken. Henpeck—You don’t say! By whom?”
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Ann Landers. Use the credit shown above instead.
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? We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.
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In context
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Provenance
The earliest known appearance
Earliest citation
The New York Times
Date
1901
Form
A henpecked husband, told his wife is “outspoken,” answers “By whom?”
Author
Unknown — unattributed in every early appearance
Minnick—Well, there was one thing I remarked about your wife the first time I saw her; she was undoubtedly outspoken. Henpeck—You don’t say! By whom?
1901
Quote Investigator’s transcription of the 1901 New York Times item, the earliest appearance it could find — see the chronology ↗. The joke’s target moves across the later citations (a wife, “women,” “the modern woman,” a hostess), which is the signature of a stock gag rather than a remembered remark.
Quote Investigator ↗ gives the earliest instance as a New York Times item of 1901, in which a henpecked husband answers “By whom?” on being told his wife is outspoken.
The gag then recurs with its target swapped: a Sally’s Sallies comic strip in 1929 (“Uncle Joe says women are outspoken—by whom?”), Punch in 1934 (“the modern woman is outspoken. By whom?”) and the Hartford Courant in 1937, citing Pearson’s Weekly.
The Dorothy Parker version enters the record in 1944, in a Bennett Cerf collection, with a hostess as the target — forty-three years after the Times printed it.
QI declines to credit Parker outright, writing that she “may have uttered the witticism, but it was in circulation before she was famous for being clever.” That is a statement about who could have said it, not who invented it.
Ann Landers’s turn comes in 1969, when QI records her answering a letter in her column with “Outspoken? By whom?” — using the joke, not making it.
The joke has no identified author and survives as an evolving formula rather than a fixed text, so quotle.info asserts no rights status. The wordings quoted here are short excerpts from the periodicals in Quote Investigator’s chronology.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Often misattributed
A joke this portable collects owners. Both of the famous ones arrive long after it was already in print.
~
The usual creditAnn Landers Popularizer, not author
QI places her use at 1969, answering a letter with the same retort — sixty-eight years after the New York Times printed the same retort. See the chronology ↗.
✕
The famous creditDorothy Parker Unproven
First attached to her in a Bennett Cerf collection of 1944. QI’s wording is deliberately cautious: she “may have uttered the witticism, but it was in circulation before she was famous for being clever.” Repeating a joke well is not the same as writing it.
~
What the record showsAn unnamed newspaper humorist Context
The target changes every time — a wife in 1901, “women” in 1929, “the modern woman” in 1934, a hostess in 1944. A fixed punchline with a floating target is a formula, and formulas do not have authors.
✓The retort was a stock newspaper gag for forty years before anyone thought to put a name on it. Parker may well have used it; so did Ann Landers; neither of them invented it.
Context
Why it mattered
The joke turns on a pun that only works in English: “outspoken” looks like a comparative — out-spoken, the way one might be outrun or outvoted — and the retort pretends to read it that way. Its earliest targets are all women described as too talkative, which dates it as precisely as a hemline.
That is also why it migrated so easily. Swap the wife for a hostess and it becomes a Dorothy Parker story; swap the hostess for a letter-writer and it becomes an Ann Landers put-down. The mechanism survives every change of target, which is exactly what lets it keep finding new authors.
Dorothy Parker may have uttered the witticism, but it was in circulation before she was famous for being clever.
Read the full story
Quote Investigator’s hedge on Parker is worth reading carefully, because it is the honest shape of most quotation research. The claim is not that she never said it — a stock joke is precisely the kind of thing a professional wit would deploy. The claim is that the joke existed first, so her saying it tells us nothing about where it came from. Fame works as a magnet in both directions: it attracts jokes that need an author, and it makes anything the famous person repeats sound original.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Pen name, created 1943 · American newspaper advice column
Ann Landers was never one person. The pen name was created by the Chicago Sun-Times columnist Ruth Crowley in 1943 and taken over by Esther “Eppie” Lederer in 1955, who wrote it until 2002. A column answering letters every day needs a reliable supply of snap retorts, and the ones it reached for were usually old. That is why so many stock jokes now carry her byline: she used them in public, under a famous name, in print.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Best available citation
Earliest documented appearance: unsigned item, The New York Times, 1901, as cited in Quote Investigator, “‘Our Host Certainly Is Outspoken’ ‘Outspoken By Whom?’,” 18 September 2010. Earliest Dorothy Parker attribution: Bennett Cerf, 1944.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Our Host Certainly Is Outspoken Outspoken By Whom?’?” Last verified 1 Oct 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/our-host-certainly-is-outspoken-outspoken-by-whom/