Parenting & Family Quote by Joey Adams

Comedy sometimes works by dressing brutality in the clothes of common sense, and Joey Adams lands that trick with a straight-faced chill. "Smack your child every day" is phrased like a household tip, the kind of casual authoritarianism mid-century parenting culture often treated as wholesome discipline. Then the second sentence snaps the logic into place: "If you don't know why - he does". The punchline isn’t that the child is guilty; it’s that guilt is assumed, permanent, and conveniently unknowable to the adult. Adams is lampooning a system where power doesn’t need evidence. It just needs routine.

The subtext is less about spanking than about the psychology of control: if punishment is constant, the child will eventually supply the reason. It’s a joke about manufacturing conscience through fear, about training kids to pre-confess. The parent’s ignorance is treated as irrelevant, even virtuous, because authority is framed as instinct. That dash before "he does" functions like a trapdoor: the adult’s uncertainty becomes proof of the child’s hidden wrongdoing. Logic is inverted, and that inversion is the gag.

Context matters because Adams is working an era when corporal punishment was mainstream and rarely questioned in polite conversation. The line plays to an audience’s recognition of that norm while also exposing its ugliness. It’s not a parenting recommendation; it’s a cynical diagnosis of how easily "discipline" becomes an alibi for dominance, wrapped in a laugh so the room can swallow it.