Parenting & Family Quote by Robert Benchley

Benchley’s joke lands because it’s delivered in the calm, advisory tone of respectable domestic wisdom, then derails into gleeful moral irresponsibility. He frames the dachshund as a piece of childproof furniture: already “stretched and pulled,” pre-damaged by design, so a kid’s roughness can’t make things worse. The laugh comes from that blunt inversion of what pet guidance is supposed to do. Instead of urging adults to teach gentleness, he proposes a breed that can absorb negligence. It’s parenting advice rewritten as liability management.

The subtext is a quiet roast of middle-class sentimentality about both children and pets. Small kids, in this view, are not innocent cherubs; they’re tiny agents of chaos. Adults, meanwhile, aren’t patient mentors; they’re shoppers looking for a product that minimizes hassle. Benchley’s language makes cruelty sound practical, which is exactly the point: he’s mocking the way convenience can masquerade as care.

Context matters. Benchley wrote in an era when urban domestic life was becoming more standardized and consumerized, with magazines and humor columns selling a vision of orderly family living. His comedy punctures that ideal with a deadpan acknowledgment of the household’s messier reality. The dachshund’s comically elongated body is the perfect prop: a breed that already looks like it’s been handled wrong. The gag isn’t just about dogs; it’s about how easily “ideal” becomes a euphemism for “easy to mistreat.”