2013-11-10
Explanation
This comic features a child asking their father to buy a book of optical illusions, only for the father to reveal he already has one. He holds up a plain text document and explains that "the text is an optical illusion -- it makes you visualize all sorts of things, but it's really just lines and squiggles." He is, of course, describing how all written language works: marks on a page that the brain decodes into meaning.
The child undercuts the father's cleverness by saying "I'm visualizing a cheapskate authority figure," turning the dad's own pseudo-profound observation against him. The father, oblivious to the burn, responds "Amazing, right?" The humor lies in the father thinking he has made a deep philosophical point about the nature of written language, while the child uses that same framework to insult him.