I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want–an adorable pancreas?

Jean Kerr’s line is a comic rejoinder to the moralizing cliché “beauty is only skin-deep.” Kerr, known for her mid‑century American domestic humor and sharp one‑liners, uses the voice of an exasperated realist to puncture the pretense that physical attractiveness is trivial. The joke hinges on taking the saying literally: if “skin-deep” is supposedly insufficient, what deeper bodily feature could anyone reasonably “want”? By invoking an “adorable pancreas,” she satirizes the demand that people pretend not to care about appearance, while also mocking the absurdity of valuing internal organs aesthetically.

The quip argues—through exaggeration—that dismissing beauty as superficial can be dishonest or sanctimonious. Kerr concedes that beauty is surface-level, but insists that this is not a meaningful criticism: surface is exactly where beauty operates. The “adorable pancreas” punchline exposes the category error in expecting beauty to be “deep,” as though attractiveness should be judged by hidden anatomy rather than visible form. More broadly, the line defends ordinary human responses to appearance while ridiculing pious rhetoric that tries to shame them, using humor to separate ethical worth from aesthetic appeal without denying the latter’s social power.