Parenting & Family Quote by Rita Rudner

Rita Rudner lands the joke by smuggling a cold legal reality into the warm fantasy packaging of dating. The usual rom-com question is some version of “Could I build a life with him?” Rudner tweaks it into a post-divorce logistics nightmare: not “forever,” but “every other weekend.” That single scheduling detail reframes romance as custody math, turning court-ordered intimacy into the unwanted sequel to passion.

The intent is sharp and defensive at once. She’s not just being picky; she’s preemptively negotiating the future terms of her own disappointment. The line performs a kind of risk assessment that many women, especially in the late-20th-century dating landscape Rudner came up in, were quietly doing anyway: if this goes bad, how bad, and how long will it follow me? The children in the joke aren’t even real yet, which is the point. She’s imagining consequences before she allows herself the luxury of idealism.

Subtext: the man you choose doesn’t just shape your life; he can become a recurring character in your kids’ lives even after you’ve written him out of yours. It’s a punchline built on modern family structures, where separation doesn’t equal disappearance. Weekends, normally coded as freedom and fun, become the time your future children are stuck with his habits, his values, his low-level chaos.

Comedically, it works because it’s specific, unglamorous, and a little ruthless. Rudner’s persona often trades in neat, observational anxieties; here, she elevates a private fear into a public laugh by saying the quiet part with surgical timing.