blind-2
Explanation
This comic starts with a father telling his son the old warning: "Son, you shouldn't masturbate -- you'll go blind!" The son responds with alarm: "Dad, oh my god, that's just an old wives' tale!" But the father clarifies he doesn't mean from masturbation directly -- he means from having no reason to go outside. The son asks how long the father has been going blind, and the father replies "Since the day you were born" -- implying that since having a child, he has had no time or energy for anything, and has essentially been trapped indoors.
The humor operates as a bait-and-switch. The setup leads the reader to expect a joke about the old myth that masturbation causes blindness. Instead, the punchline pivots to a darker, more relatable joke about parenting: the father has been metaphorically (or literally) going blind from never leaving the house since his son was born. The final panel showing father and son on a small dock overlooking a vast landscape underscores the irony -- the father is finally outside but the damage is done. It is a classic SMBC move of taking a familiar premise and twisting it into an unexpected commentary on a completely different topic.