Parenting & Family Quote by Robert Orben

"Do your kids a favor - don't have any" is a neat little verbal trap: it pretends to offer selfless parenting advice while yanking the rug out from under the very idea of parenting. Coming from Robert Orben, a show-business humorist built for punchlines and panel shows, the intent isn’t manifesto; it’s mischief. The joke works because it weaponizes a culturally sacred phrase ("do your kids a favor") and then commits an instant taboo: erasing the kids entirely.

The subtext is less anti-child than anti-sentimentality. It skewers the way adults romanticize parenting in public while privately trading horror stories about sleep deprivation, money stress, and the sudden death of spontaneity. Orben’s line compresses that whole complaint into one clean reversal. It also nods to a mid-to-late 20th-century comedic tradition where domestic life is framed as a trap: the spouse, the in-laws, the mortgage, the minivan. The laugh depends on recognition, not persuasion.

Context matters: Orben’s era prized one-liners that could land in a nightclub or on a talk show in under five seconds. That economy forces the quote to be a pressure valve, not a nuanced argument about reproductive ethics. Still, it carries a modern echo: in a culture that sells parenthood as fulfillment while making it structurally harder, the line reads like a cynical consumer review. It’s funny because it’s too sharp to be polite and too familiar to be dismissed.