You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests that you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.

This line is widely circulated as a piece of Dave Barry’s observational humor about social etiquette and the perils of making assumptions about other people’s bodies. It reflects Barry’s long-running comic persona—an everyman narrator offering mock-serious “rules” drawn from everyday embarrassment, especially around gendered interactions. The joke belongs to the broader late-20th-century American stand-up/column tradition of turning common social anxieties into exaggerated cautions. Although frequently attributed to Barry in quotation collections and online reposts, the precise first publication venue (column, book, or performance transcript) is often not cited alongside the quote.

Barry’s point is a hyperbolic etiquette rule: never comment on a woman’s possible pregnancy unless it is absolutely undeniable. The humor comes from pushing “certainty” to an absurd extreme—“an actual baby emerging”—to underline how high the stakes are when a mistaken assumption could cause humiliation or hurt. Beneath the joke is a critique of casual body commentary and the social expectation that others may feel entitled to remark on women’s appearance. The line works as both a comic warning about conversational landmines and a reminder that politeness often means withholding speculative observations.