2013-04-29
Explanation
This comic shows a wedding scene where a bride asks her father why he's crying. The father responds with bewilderment: "I... I don't know. It's as if a module of my brain completely inverted when your husband said 'I do.'" He continues, "And now I have demands. Offputting personal demands." The caption below defines "Marriage; noun: The moment in life when parents go from discouraging you from having unprotected sex to insisting you have unprotected sex."
The comic highlights one of the genuinely strange social reversals that happens around marriage. Before marriage, parents typically spend years warning their children about the dangers of unprotected sex and unwanted pregnancy. But the moment a wedding occurs, many parents undergo an almost instantaneous transformation into people who actively pressure their children to produce grandchildren -- which of course requires the very same unprotected sex they previously warned against. The father's description of it as a "module of his brain completely inverting" is a funny way to describe this abrupt behavioral shift, and his self-aware confusion about his own sudden "offputting personal demands" (wanting grandchildren) adds to the comedy. The dictionary-definition format in the caption gives the observation a mock-academic authority.