2012-01-31
Explanation
This single-panel comic depicts a father bursting into his son's bedroom announcing that there was a radiation leak from his synchrotron experiment, but reassuring the boy that "if the shield to your room held, you won't grow body hair in any new places." The caption below reads: "In the future, it will be possible to predict the exact day when puberty starts."
The humor works on two levels. On the surface, it imagines a comically irresponsible scientist-father whose home experiments endanger his family. But the real joke is about puberty: the father's "warning" about body hair growing in new places is exactly what happens during adolescence, and the boy is clearly at that age. The comic suggests that the father has invented an elaborate cover story involving radiation to explain the onset of puberty to his son, or alternatively, that future parents will be able to time their "synchrotron accidents" to coincide precisely with when puberty would have started anyway, giving them plausible deniability for an awkward conversation.