40th Birthday Wishes
Forty gets more jokes than any other birthday, most of them recycled since the 1980s. There's a better approach: acknowledge that forty is genuinely a good age — enough experience to be useful, enough time left to do something with it — and then make one joke, well. These ten are built that way.
10 Fortieth Birthday Wishes
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Happy 40th. Four decades in and you've finally stopped apologising for things that aren't your fault. Progress.
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Forty years old and better company than ever. Happy birthday.
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Happy 40th birthday. You've got the experience of an adult and the energy of someone who naps deliberately.
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Happy birthday. Forty's the age where you know what you want and stop pretending otherwise. Suits you.
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Here's to forty: old enough to be taken seriously, young enough to start something new. Happy birthday.
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Happy 40th. You've built a good life out of these years, and it shows.
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Forty. The knees complain, the confidence doesn't. Happy birthday.
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Happy birthday. Your twenties were loud, your thirties were busy — this decade's yours.
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Happy 40th birthday to someone who's earned every bit of the life they've got.
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Forty years and still improving. Happy birthday.
Who Gets to Make the Jokes
Age jokes work between peers and fall flat coming from anyone significantly younger. If you're twenty-five writing to a forty-year-old, skip the over-the-hill material entirely — it reads as thoughtless rather than funny. If you're both hitting forty this year, joke freely; shared decline is one of the great comic subjects.
For a partner turning forty, the wife and husband collections give you warmer wording to combine with a lighter line.
Related collections
Questions
Are "over the hill" cards still funny?
Occasionally, from a close friend. From a colleague or a younger relative, they land as rude. Life expectancy makes forty a strange place to put the hill anyway.
What's a good 40th gift?
Experiences do well at forty — a trip, a course, a good bottle to keep. People at this age generally have enough objects.