Motherhood Quote by Milton Berle

Berle’s line is built like a mock-scientific complaint, a domestically grounded heckle aimed at the grand seriousness of “evolution.” The joke works because it yanks a cosmic theory down to a kitchen-sink problem: any parent knows the daily math doesn’t add up. Babies need holding, toddlers need chasing, groceries need carrying, and the phone inevitably rings at the worst time. Two hands feels like a design flaw. By framing that exhaustion as evidence against evolution, Berle isn’t attacking Darwin so much as spotlighting the absurdity of expecting life to be optimally engineered.

The subtext is a classic Berle move: take a modern authority (science, progress, expertise) and let ordinary experience puncture its pretensions. It’s not anti-intellectual as much as anti-lecturing. The audience doesn’t need to know a thing about natural selection; they just need to have lived through a day when multitasking became triage. The laugh is recognition disguised as argument.

Context matters. Berle came up in an era when American comedy leaned heavily on family life as a public language, and mid-century culture sold “mom” as a tireless domestic machine. The line quietly exposes that myth. It flatters mothers by admitting the job is impossible, while also poking at a world that treats their overload as normal. Evolution “works,” sure; it just didn’t volunteer to babysit.