Life & Wisdom Quote by George Alec Effinger

Effinger’s line lands like a one-liner from a coroner with a stand-up slot: viciously efficient, darkly funny, and pointed at the way adults talk about youth as if it’s not a phase but a pathology. “Adolescence” here isn’t just moodiness; it’s the whole inconvenient bundle of volatility, experimentation, and resistance that polite society would rather medicate, discipline, or hurry through. By offering “premature burial” as the “cure,” he’s not proposing violence so much as exposing the latent violence already hiding in everyday language about teenagers: the casual wish to erase the messy in-between and skip straight to compliant adulthood.

The mechanics of the joke matter. “Works just fine” mimics the bland voice of consumer assurance, the tone of an infomercial or a satisfied bureaucrat signing off on an efficient solution. That deadpan phrasing is the knife twist: it frames something monstrous as practical, the way institutions often launder cruelty through procedure and euphemism. The humor isn’t a release valve; it’s an indictment.

Contextually, Effinger’s work often inhabits worlds where bodies and identities are modular, controlled, and commodified, and where “fixing” people is a business model. Read through that lens, adolescence becomes another problem to be solved by force, technology, or social pressure - a reminder that the future’s sleekest systems still carry old impulses: fear of unruly desire, impatience with uncertainty, contempt for those not yet fully legible. The line shocks because it’s only exaggerating what’s already implied when we demand young people stop being young on schedule.