Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your children.

Sam Levenson (1911–1980) was an American humorist, teacher-turned-performer, and a familiar presence on mid‑20th‑century radio and television. Much of his comedy drew on domestic life—especially the strains and absurdities of parenting—delivered in a dry, aphoristic style suited to monologues, after-dinner speaking, and short printed quips. This line belongs to that tradition of family humor: it riffs on the then-common notion of heredity and “inherited” traits, flipping it into a parental complaint that children are the source of a parent’s frazzled state. It is typically circulated as a standalone one-liner rather than tied to a single, well-cited performance date.

The joke hinges on a reversal. “Insanity is hereditary” sounds like a sober, pseudo-scientific claim about genetic transmission; the punchline—“You get it from your children”—inverts the direction of inheritance and turns biology into lived experience. Levenson uses the language of medical authority to describe a familiar emotional truth: children can exhaust, worry, and overwhelm their parents to the point of feeling unhinged. The humor depends on exaggeration, but it also captures a cultural script of parenthood as both loving and maddening. As an aphorism, it’s memorable because it compresses complaint, affection, and irony into a single neat twist.