35 Hilarious Quotes About Fatherhood From Jim Gaffigan

Jim Gaffigan knows the highs and lows of parenting. The comedian and author has five children with his wife, Jeannie Gaffigan.

Gaffigan often shares LOL-worthy anecdotes and musings about fatherhood on Twitter, in his stand-up routines and in the pages of his books. In honor of his birthday on Saturday, we’ve rounded up 35 of his funniest quotes about parenting.

“I used to wonder why I had hair on my legs, but now I know it’s for my toddler sons and daughters to pull themselves up off the ground with as I scream in pain.”

“Babies are the worst roommates. They’re unemployed. They don’t pay rent. They keep insane hours. Their hygiene is horrible. If you had a roommate that did any of the things babies do, you’d ask them to move out. ‘Do you remember what happened last night? Today you’re all smiles, but last night you were hitting the bottle really hard. Then you started screaming, and you threw up on me. Then you passed out and wet yourself. I went into the other room to get you some dry clothes, I came back, and you were all over my wife’s breasts! Right in front of me, her husband! Dude, you gotta move out.’”

“Parenting is a cult. And as a cult member, you can try to explain it to other people, but we just appear like lunatics.”

“Being a parent involves an unnecessary amount of fake enthusiasm around little kids’ poo being in a toilet.”

“Once your baby starts to walk you’ll realize why cribs are designed like prisons from the early 1900s. This is clearly because toddlers are a danger to themselves. The main responsibility for a parent of a toddler is to stop them from accidentally hurting or killing themselves. They are superclumsy. If you don’t believe me, watch a 2-year-old girl attempt to walk up stairs in a long dress. It looks like a Carol Burnett sketch.”

“There should be a children’s song: ‘If you’re happy and you know it, keep it to yourself and let your dad sleep.’”

“The only difference between riding a tandem bike with your 8 yr old and dragging a dead body is nothing.”

“Raising kids may be a thankless job with ridiculous hours, but at least the pay sucks.”

“My 4 yr old son gave me a hand made card for Father’s Day. Maybe for Christmas I’ll draw him a picture of some toys.”

“[T]oddler judgment is horrible. They don’t have any. Put a 12-month-old on a bed, and they will immediately try and crawl off headfirst like a lemming on a mindless migration mission. But the toddler mission is never mindless. They have two goals: find poison and find something to destroy.”

“INTERESTING FACT: The term ‘Never forget’ was first muttered by parents leaving Disney.”

“Ninety percent of parenting is hiding iPads from your children.”

“Occasionally, a dog will be presented as some training method for having a baby. ‘My girlfriend and I got a dog. We are going to see if we can handle that before we have kids.’ This is a little like testing the waters of being a vegetarian by having lettuce on your burger. Okay, maybe that metaphor doesn’t make sense, but neither does using a dog as a training method for having a baby.” 

“Children have a tendency to behave as poorly as the most poorly behaved kid in the room. The laws of physics dictate that if there is a kid screaming and running in the hallway of a hotel, all the other children will scream and run in the hallway of the hotel.”

“If only the objective of parenting was to raise really louds [sic] kids, I would be killing it.”

“Whenever I travel with my young children, I’m always reminded of an important travel lesson: Never travel with my young children.”

“Women are amazing. Think about it this way: A woman can grow a baby inside her body. Then a woman can deliver the baby through her body. Then, by some miracle, a woman can feed a baby with her body. When you compare that to the male’s contribution to life, it’s kind of embarrassing, really.”

“Watching and pretending to enjoy Joel Schumacher’s ‘Batman & Robin’ with my 6-year-old son may be the hardest thing I’ve done as a parent.”

“Bedtime makes you realize how completely incapable you are of being in charge of another human being. My children act like they’ve never been to sleep before. ‘Bed? What’s that? No, I’m not doing that.’ They never want to go to bed. This is another thing that I will never have in common with my children. Every morning when I wake up, my first thought is, ‘When can I come back here?’ It’s the carrot that keeps me motivated. Sometimes going to bed feels like the highlight of my day. Ironically, to my children, bedtime is a punishment that violates their basic rights as human beings. Once the lights are out, you can expect at least an hour of inmates clanging their tin cups on the cell bars.” 

“Parenting involves way too much carrying.”

“Be nice to your dad. Most of fatherhood feels like going through customs with an outdated passport.”

“Look, you lost a tooth. Congratulations. Enjoy looking like a hillbilly. Here’s a dollar.”  

“Whoever came up with the term ‘terrible twos’ must have felt very foolish after their kid turned three.” 

“With five little kids, there is no ending to bedtime. There is always one awake. Like they are taking shifts. I imagine they have scheduling meetings: “All right, I’ll annoy Dad from midnight to 2 a.m. Who wants the 3 to 6 a.m. shift? Now everyone lie down and practice kicking Dad in your sleep.′ Whenever one of my children says, ‘Goodnight, Daddy,’ I always think to myself, ‘You don’t mean that.’”

“‘How old is your baby?’ is the ‘How about this weather?’ of parenting.”

“The hardest part of parenting is when I’m with my kids.”

“No matter how you feel about your extended family or family gatherings you will be attending. This is because now the ultimate reason for attending family gatherings is for your children to have the time of their lives with their cousins. Little kids love their cousins. I’m not being cute or exaggerating here. Cousins are like celebrities for little kids. If little kids had a People magazine, cousins would be on the cover. Cousins are the barometers of how fun a family get-together will be. ‘Are the cousins going to be there? Fun!’”

“You know what it’s like having a fourth kid? Imagine you’re drowning, then someone hands you a baby.”

“There are two philosophies when it comes to getting young children to sleep. There is ‘sleep training,’ which basically involves putting your kids to bed and listening to them scream all night; or there is ‘attachment parenting,’ which essentially involves lying down with your kids, cuddling them, and then listening to them scream all night.”

“People get burned out in big families, you can even see it in the naming of children. It’s always like, the first kid, ‘You were named after Grandma.’ The seventh kid,‘“You were named after a sandwich I had. Now get your brother, Reuben.’”

“There should be an iPhone alarm noise of screaming children for homesick parents.”

“How kids feel about snow days is the exact opposite of how parents feel about snow days.”

“Why do kids cry when you brush their teeth but they can’t feel food on their face?”

“Holidays are also an opportunity for kids to unlearn every good habit they’ve learned during the rest of the year. They don’t go to school. They get to stay up past their bedtime. They get candy and presents for doing nothing. Childhood utopia.” 

“I don’t know what’s more exhausting about parenting: the getting up early or the acting like you know what you are doing.”