Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.

This line is a characteristic Dave Barry one-liner, delivered in the voice of mock “practical advice” that Barry often used in his newspaper humor columns and in collections drawn from them. It belongs to his long-running persona of the well-meaning but comically alarmist guide to everyday life, where banal topics (health, consumer products, domestic routines) become setups for absurd, bodily humor. The joke depends on the juxtaposition of two common over-the-counter remedies and the implied disastrous consequences of combining them, echoing Barry’s broader comedic method: take a familiar situation, apply literal-minded logic, and push it to an embarrassing extreme.

On the surface, the sentence reads like a stern safety warning, but its real function is comic misdirection. Barry mimics the authoritative tone of medical or parental counsel (“Never, under any circumstances…”) and then undercuts it with a scenario whose consequences are obvious, undignified, and therefore funny. The humor comes from the reader instantly imagining the predicament: sedation plus forced digestion equals loss of control. More broadly, the line satirizes our desire for simple rules to manage the body and modern life, suggesting that some “wisdom” is merely common sense reframed as solemn instruction—made memorable by its blunt, taboo-adjacent physicality.