Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

A group of girls at what appears to be a sleepover excitedly ask the classic joke, "Why did the chicken cross the road?" An older woman with glasses -- clearly an English teacher -- answers in the most joyless way possible: "The road was a metaphor for the transition to womanhood." The girls stare at her in uncomfortable silence.

The caption below reads: "This is why English teachers are not invited to sleepovers." The comic pokes fun at the tendency of literature teachers to over-analyze everything, finding deep symbolic meaning even in the simplest of jokes. The specific choice of interpreting the chicken joke -- which famously has the most deliberately anticlimactic punchline possible ("to get to the other side") -- through a lens of feminist literary criticism makes the teacher's response especially absurd. It also plays on the idea that English teachers can't simply enjoy anything at face value; they are compelled to deconstruct and assign metaphorical weight to even the most lighthearted content.