One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. "Oh, no," I said. "Disneyland burned down." He cried and cried, but I think that deep down, he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late.

This line is characteristic of Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts,” a recurring comedic feature written for Saturday Night Live in the early 1990s and later collected in bestselling books. Handey’s persona delivers faux-earnest, aphoristic “wisdom” that abruptly turns dark, petty, or absurd. The Disneyland/warehouse bait-and-switch fits the recurring Deep Thoughts pattern: a seemingly wholesome observation about children is undercut by a casually cruel prank and an anticlimactic ending. The humor depends on the deadpan narration and the mismatch between the moralizing setup and the narrator’s selfish, illogical follow-through.

The quote parodies sentimental ideas about childhood and adult benevolence. It begins with a generalization—“kids like to be tricked”—as if offering parenting insight, then escalates into an outrageous deception that causes real distress. The narrator’s insistence that the child “deep down” enjoyed it satirizes adult rationalizations for unkind behavior, while the final line (“it was getting pretty late”) adds a banal excuse that exposes the speaker’s indifference. The piece’s significance lies in how it mimics the cadence of moral reflection while revealing the emptiness (and cruelty) behind the supposed lesson.