Parenting & Family Quote by Red Buttons

Violence gets deflated here not with moral sermonizing but with a cheap shot to the ego - and the anatomy. Red Buttons, a vaudeville-to-TV-era comic, knows his audience has heard the pious line about not hitting children and tuned it out. So he reroutes the warning through self-interest: raise your hand, and you expose your groin. The laugh comes from the sudden pivot from parental authority to parental vulnerability, a slapstick image that turns the would-be disciplinarian into the one at risk.

The specific intent is practical and performative: stop the impulse to strike by making it ridiculous. Buttons isn’t arguing child psychology; he’s offering a reflex-stopping mantra. In the subtext, there’s a sly acknowledgment of how normalized corporal punishment once was. He doesn’t pretend the temptation doesn’t exist. He assumes it does - then uses humor to shame it without sounding sanctimonious. The joke also recasts power: the adult may be bigger, but a kid is closer to knee height. The body becomes a moral lever.

Context matters. Coming out of an era when “a good smack” was mainstream parenting advice, Buttons smuggles a humane position into club-ready material. It’s a classic comic tactic: deliver a social correction disguised as a punchline, so the room can accept it without admitting it needed correcting. The line lands because it swaps righteousness for risk, ethics for embarrassment - and lets laughter do the policing.