2013-10-12
Explanation
This comic plays on the classic childhood fear of monsters under the bed. A mother reassures her child, "Daddy, there's no monster under my bed." But the father, rather than simply comforting the child, launches into an elaborate and terrifying description of a real-world scenario: he describes the ancient darkness of a primeval forest, something crawling toward them, the sound of claws scraping through the night, and so on. The child grows increasingly frightened as the father's supposedly reassuring bedtime talk becomes more and more like a horror story.
The twist comes when the child asks what's making the noise. The father reveals it is something mundane or scientific -- possibly describing raccoons, or some other real creature -- and the child says "That's terrifying!" But the father seems pleased with himself for replacing an imaginary fear (monsters) with a real one (nature). The punchline appears to involve the father reading from a book, suggesting he has been reading the child a nature or science book at bedtime that turned out to be far more frightening than any fictional monster story.
The votey panel shows a man in bed nervously thinking "Please not entirely wrong. Please not entirely wrong" -- suggesting the father is now himself lying awake wondering if his vivid description of something lurking in the dark was perhaps a bit too accurate, and hoping he has not actually described something real that might be outside. This is a classic SMBC pattern of taking a simple premise (bedtime fears) and escalating it through intellectual overthinking until the "rational" explanation becomes scarier than the original fear.