“Let’s get out of these wet clothes and into a dry Martini” is a flirtatious, wry invitation line. It plays on sounding like the opening of a seduction, suggesting that someone soaked by rain or a swim should change out of their clothes, and then swerves at the last moment into offering a drink instead. The joke turns on the double sense of “dry”, meaning both a Martini mixed without sweet vermouth and the state of being dry after getting wet, and on the gap between what the line seems to promise and what it actually delivers. It survives today chiefly as a quoted piece of old Hollywood wit, trotted out knowingly when someone gets caught in the rain or as a mock-suave way of offering a drink rather than anything more direct.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘let’s get out of these wet clothes and into a dry Martini’?
The line is first securely attested on screen in Every Day’s a Holiday, filmed in September 1937 and released on 18 December 1937, in which Charles Butterworth says to Mae West’s character, “You oughta get out of those wet clothes and into a dry martini.” But the joke was already circulating before the film reached audiences: a Hollywood trade-paper column printed it on 14 August 1937, months ahead of the film’s release, describing it as a line someone remembered hearing but could not place: “Someone recalled the following line of swell dialog the other day, but couldn’t remember where it came from.” That same year, a syndicated column by Paul Harrison described the humorist and actor Robert Benchley sighing a near-identical version of it on a film set: “Golly, it’ll be nice to get out of this wet suit and into a dry Martini!”
Benchley’s name became the one most popularly tied to the phrase, partly through his use of a variant in The Major and the Minor in 1942, but he himself denied coining it, saying he had read it in a joke book. Accounts of who actually wrote the line disagree: the director and co-writer Billy Wilder said Benchley came up with it, while Benchley in turn credited it to his friend Charles Butterworth, the actor who spoke it in Every Day’s a Holiday. The writer and wit Alexander Woollcott has also been named as a possible source. With the trade-paper evidence showing the line already in oral circulation before any of these men can be shown to have used it, no single coiner can be established with any confidence.