being-an-adult
Explanation
The Joke
A parent is explaining to a child what it is like being an adult. The parent describes the common adult experience of having to deal with complex, tedious, and often humiliating bureaucratic tasks. The parent explains that adults have to lie to their kids about the tooth fairy, go to the doctor only to have the doctor awkwardly spread and poke at them, and deal with an ever-growing pile of paperwork and responsibilities.
The parent further elaborates that the older you get, the more people you have to deal with, and the number of forms tends to grow exponentially. The parent describes having to navigate complex situations like knowing insurance codes, dealing with multiple specialists, and juggling various administrative requirements. The parent also mentions the indignity of tasks like touching someone else's bathroom drain hair.
The child, having heard all of this, says "That is how Mario starts" -- comparing the bleak accumulation of adult responsibilities to the beginning of a video game level. The humor lies in the child's innocent reframing of the adult's miserable description as something that sounds like a video game tutorial or opening level, where things start out easy and get progressively harder.
The Humor
The comic plays on the contrast between a child's perspective and an adult's perspective on growing up. What the adult describes as a cascade of increasingly miserable responsibilities, the child interprets through the lens of video game difficulty progression -- things start manageable and ramp up. The punchline works because the child's comparison is accidentally apt: adult life really does feel like a game that keeps getting harder with each level, except there are no power-ups and the rewards are mostly just "not getting fined" or "not dying."
The comic also satirizes the common parental impulse to be honest with children about what lies ahead, only for the child to completely miss the gravity of the situation and filter it through their own frame of reference.