Parenting & Family Quote by Bert Williams

A perfect joke with a poisoned aftertaste: Bert Williams slips a linguistic banana peel under the audience, then lets them notice who’s doing the slipping. The setup is disarmingly sweet - children named after flowers telegraphs sentimentality, gentility, the kind of domestic respectability vaudeville crowds were trained to find “charming.” Then comes the hard left turn: “my son, Artificial.” The laugh lands on the absurdity of treating “Artificial” as a flower name, but the word is doing double duty. It’s a wink at the manufactured nature of stage life, of personas, of anything sold as “natural” in entertainment.

For Williams, a Black star working in early 20th-century American popular theater, “artificial” also reads like a coded survival tactic. His career required an exhausting choreography of performance - often including the conventions of minstrelsy that demanded a version of Blackness palatable to white audiences. The gag’s subtext is that even the most intimate markers of identity (your children’s names, your legacy) can feel like part of the act when society insists your authenticity is either threatening or fake.

The line works because it’s economical misdirection: it invites you to laugh at a harmless domestic bit, then forces you to realize the punchline is a commentary on fabrication itself. Williams isn’t just being cute; he’s smuggling a critique of “naturalness” as a cultural credential, and of how easily audiences confuse performance with person.