2012-04-26
Explanation
This single-panel comic (plus header) is titled "The number one rule of parenting is '''remember to have fun.'''" It shows a father kneeling down to comfort his young daughter outside an X-ray room, saying: "Don'''t worry, sweetie. The doctor just wants to see if there'''s a skeleton hiding inside your body. But, she probably won'''t find anything."
The humor comes from the father taking the parenting advice to "have fun" and applying it by deliberately frightening his child with a playfully horrifying reframing of a routine medical procedure. Instead of explaining that X-rays are a normal, painless way to look at bones, he frames it as a search for a hidden skeleton -- as though finding one would be a terrible discovery. The phrase "she probably won'''t find anything" implies there is a real chance a skeleton might be lurking inside the child, which is both technically true (there is definitely a skeleton in there) and designed to maximize a small child'''s anxiety.
The votey panel continues the joke with the father looking at the X-ray results and exclaiming to his daughter, "Oh my God. There'''s a skull INSIDE your head." This is the payoff -- the father is now pretending to be horrified by the completely normal X-ray results, taking his trolling of his own child to its logical conclusion. The comic celebrates a particular style of dad humor where the fun is entirely at the child'''s expense.