bitter
Explanation
This comic features a child asking their father a common question: "Dad, why do adults get bitter over time?" The father responds with a pseudo-evolutionary explanation that gets increasingly absurd.
He begins with a plausible-sounding premise: "In the days of the savanna, humans were stalked by lions. We evolved to be bitter so they wouldn't like the taste of us." This plays on the double meaning of "bitter" -- the emotional state of being resentful and cynical versus the actual taste of bitterness. The father is treating the metaphorical "bitter" as if it were literally a flavor that predators could taste.
He then extends this fake evolutionary logic: "It's why people who have to work a lot tend to be most bitter. Their bodies think they're community defenders and up the bitterness in defense." This pseudo-scientific explanation mimics the style of evolutionary psychology, a field sometimes criticized for generating unfalsifiable "just-so stories" that explain any human behavior through adaptive fitness.
The joke escalates further: "That's why they talk about their health issues and modern society so loudly, so predators can hear." This reframes the stereotypical behavior of complaining older adults -- griping loudly about their health problems and the state of the world -- as an evolved predator-defense mechanism, as if the complaining itself were a warning signal.
The final panel delivers the kicker: "The lions are gone, but the complaints live on." This is a parody of the common evolutionary psychology framing that many modern human behaviors are vestigial adaptations from the savanna era (like the fight-or-flight response or sugar cravings). The joke is that the father has constructed an entirely bogus evolutionary narrative to explain why adults complain all the time, making it sound scientific when it is really just a roundabout way of saying "old people are grumpy." The child appears to accept this nonsense uncritically, which adds another layer of humor.