2012-03-09
Explanation
This single-panel comic shows an old man pointing to his mouth and telling a group of children "It all goes in here." The caption reads: Grandpa refers to this as his "circle of life." The joke is a crude play on the famous concept from The Lion King, where the "circle of life" represents the grand, majestic cycle of birth, growth, death, and renewal in nature.
Grandpa'''s version of the "circle of life" is far less poetic -- he'''s simply referring to the fact that everything he encounters (presumably food and drink) goes into his mouth. It reduces the profound philosophical concept of life'''s interconnected cycles to the mundane biological reality of an old man'''s eating habits. The humor lies in the deflation from the cosmic to the crudely literal.
The votey panel breaks the fourth wall, with someone asking Zach Weinersmith: "Oh God. Now that you'''re 30, you'''re wearing suspenders like the old men in your comic?" He responds: "The real question you should be asking is what they'''re holding up" -- a suggestive joke implying the suspenders are holding up something other than pants, and also a meta-commentary on how the cartoonist is aging into his own characters.