2011-04-22
Explanation
The comic is titled "Sometimes I worry I'll be a bad father" and shows a father reading from a book of fables to his young daughter. He is telling her the story of the tortoise and the hare, but instead of delivering the traditional moral about persistence and hard work, he offers a reinterpretation: the hare "put in far less effort than the tortoise, but still got second place, which is, you know, pretty freakin' good."
The humor comes from the father extracting exactly the wrong lesson from the classic fable. Instead of teaching his daughter that steady effort beats lazy talent, he is essentially teaching her that being lazy but talented is a great strategy because you can coast to a decent result with minimal work. The title banner confirms this is played as a parenting failure, but the father's interpretation is arguably more realistic than the original moral, which adds a layer of uncomfortable truth to the joke.