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Happiness Quote by Joseph Barbera

"I don't know anyone who enjoys going to the hospital. To help remedy this, I got an idea to create what a Laugh Room in the pediatric ward of hospitals"

About this Quote

Nobody loves a hospital visit; Barbera’s move is to treat that fact not as a sad inevitability but as a design problem with a punchline. The quote’s plainspoken setup ("I don't know anyone...") works like a comedian’s cold open: an obvious truth said out loud to invite agreement. Then he pivots to “remedy,” borrowing the hospital’s own language of cure and applying it to mood. That word choice quietly argues that fear and boredom aren’t side effects of illness - they’re part of the illness experience, and therefore worth treating.

The “Laugh Room” idea lands because it reframes entertainment as care, not distraction. Coming from a cartoonist who helped define mid-century American animation (and its kid-friendly, chaos-taming optimism), the subtext is almost a manifesto: the same tools that make children feel safe in front of a TV can be repurposed to make them feel safe in a ward. It’s also a rare admission of power from pop culture: cartoons aren’t just products; they’re emotional infrastructure.

Context matters. Postwar children’s media was becoming a national language, and hospitals were increasingly institutional, efficient, and intimidating. Barbera’s proposal threads those worlds together, suggesting that sterile spaces can be redesigned around the patient’s inner life. There’s a humane shrewdness here: he doesn’t promise laughter will fix disease. He proposes it might fix the room - the atmosphere - and by extension give kids a sense of agency in the one place they have the least.

Quote Details

TopicHealth
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Barbera, Joseph. (2026, January 18). I don't know anyone who enjoys going to the hospital. To help remedy this, I got an idea to create what a Laugh Room in the pediatric ward of hospitals. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-dont-know-anyone-who-enjoys-going-to-the-18661/

Chicago Style
Barbera, Joseph. "I don't know anyone who enjoys going to the hospital. To help remedy this, I got an idea to create what a Laugh Room in the pediatric ward of hospitals." FixQuotes. January 18, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-dont-know-anyone-who-enjoys-going-to-the-18661/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I don't know anyone who enjoys going to the hospital. To help remedy this, I got an idea to create what a Laugh Room in the pediatric ward of hospitals." FixQuotes, 18 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-dont-know-anyone-who-enjoys-going-to-the-18661/. Accessed 9 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Joseph Barbera (March 24, 1911 - December 18, 2006) was a Cartoonist from USA.

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