These big birthday parties my friends make for their kids. One of my friends had a surprise party for her child. He was one year old. We all snuck in around the crib, jumped up, and yelled, "Surprise!" He's in therapy now.

Rudner’s joke satirizes the modern tendency to stage elaborate, adult-oriented celebrations for very young children—events that often seem more about the parents’ social performance than the child’s experience. By pushing the premise to an absurd extreme (a “surprise” party for a one-year-old, staged like an ambush around a crib), she highlights how inappropriate adult expectations can be when applied to infants. The punchline—“He’s in therapy now”—uses comic exaggeration to suggest that what adults frame as fun can be startling or even distressing to a child, and it also pokes fun at a culture quick to medicalize or therapize life’s discomforts.