Smack your child every day. If you don't know why — he does.

Cast as a one-liner in Joey Adams’s brash, nightclub-style humor, the quip relies on shock and exaggeration rather than literal advice. It satirizes authoritarian parenting by pushing it to an absurd extreme: the parent needn’t even know the reason for punishment because the child supposedly “must” have done something. The punch line flips moral responsibility, implying guilt is assumed and discipline is arbitrary—an implicit critique of punitive power dynamics in the family. Read this way, the joke exposes how routine corporal punishment can become self-justifying and disconnected from actual wrongdoing, with “he does” functioning as a cynical shorthand for presumed guilt.