2012-09-19
Explanation
This single-panel comic is titled "Parenting Tip: Existential Dread is Nature's All-Purpose Punishment." It shows a father and son sitting at a dinner table with a plate of broccoli. The child says "I don't wanna eat broccoli," and the father responds by reading from what appears to be a tablet or book: "You are incapable of conceptualizing your non-existence, so no matter when it comes, death will be unexpec--" before the child interrupts with "Okay! Okay!" and presumably agrees to eat the broccoli.
The joke is that instead of using conventional parenting techniques like reasoning, bribery, or traditional punishment to get a child to eat vegetables, this father deploys heavy existential philosophy about the inevitability and incomprehensibility of death. The humor comes from the massive disproportionality between the trivial childhood disobedience (not wanting to eat broccoli) and the philosophical nuclear weapon deployed to address it. The father is essentially weaponizing the kind of existential dread that keeps philosophers up at night, using it as a mundane parenting tool.
The votey panel shows the child asking someone (presumably the mother) "Can't you just spank?" to which she replies "That'd be cruel." This adds another layer of irony -- the parents consider physical punishment cruel but see nothing wrong with inflicting existential terror on their child, suggesting a hilariously skewed sense of what constitutes appropriate discipline.