Great! You can also say, “I was finally able to pull it off.” That is a really common thing to say in this situation.

Great example! I would just connect those two so they are the same sentence: “She pulled off the surprise party for her husband, even though she didn’t have much time.”

By the way, congratulations for identifying that joke – I remember writing it and wondering if people would understand it.

This is a little bit of a joke. “To his credit” is something you say before someone does something good. You often use this when you say something good about someone that you have a neutral or negative opinion about. You might say, “My sister and I don’t often get along, but to her credit, she was there for me when I needed her.” In this case, “to her credit” means “this is something good that she did.”

“Discredit” is the opposite of “credit.” You don’t often say “to his discredit” – that is very rare. But that’s the joke. In this case, I was saying that El Chapo tried to escape from jail, but failed. Then I almost said, “To his credit [something good that he did], he did escape from jail twice in the past.” But is escaping from jail really good? For him, it’s successful. But it’s not really good. So the joke is, “To his credit–or maybe to his discredit–he did escape from jail twice before.”

And in total that means: “I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but he did escape from jail twice before.”