Time & Perspective Quote by Dave Barry

Dave Barry’s joke works because it commits a small act of verbal vandalism against a sacred object: the baby. Modern culture treats infants as halos with cheeks, icons of purity whose every gurgle is evidence of wonder. Barry swerves hard in the opposite direction, reducing the mystique to a single bodily function: drool. The punchline isn’t just “babies are gross”; it’s the audacity of demystifying them with mock-scientific certainty, as if parenthood were a lab report and the only data point worth charting is spit.

The parenthetical disclaimer - “and I am not for a moment suggesting that you should” - is the engine. It performs innocence while inviting the forbidden image. Barry understands that the laugh lives in the reader’s momentary complicity: you pictured it. The aside also parodies the moral panic around edgy humor, anticipating outrage and defanging it in the same breath. He’s not advocating harm; he’s satirizing how quickly we sanitize language to prove we’re good people.

Context matters: Barry came up as a newspaper humorist, writing for a broad audience that included exhausted parents. This line flatters them by telling the truth they’re not allowed to say at baby showers: infants are not tiny sages; they’re messy, single-purpose machines. The subtext is a pressure valve. When society insists you experience constant awe, comedy offers permission to experience reality - and still love the creature producing all that drool.