but-dad
Explanation
The Joke
The comic shows a father-son conversation where the son says "Dad, I know you're trying to give me good advice, but--" and the father interrupts with stereotypical fatherly dating advice: "Boy, women don't care about you. They want one thing and one thing only: to paralyze a caterpillar and bury their eggs in its moist body." The son protests, "Charlotte isn't like that, Dad!" The caption at the bottom reads: "Interspecies adoption is always difficult."
The twist is that the father is a parasitoid wasp, sitting in an armchair like a typical sitcom dad. He's giving his adopted human son advice about women based on wasp reproductive biology. The joke works on multiple levels: it looks like a standard "overprotective dad gives bad dating advice" setup, but the punchline reveals the father is a wasp describing actual parasitoid wasp behavior (laying eggs inside paralyzed caterpillars), and the son is the adopted one in this interspecies family.
The Humor
The comedy comes from the subversion of the familiar "dad gives son dating advice" trope. The reader initially assumes a human father is being cynical about women, but the reveal that the father is a parasitoid wasp recontextualizes the advice as biologically accurate rather than misogynistic. The additional layer of humor is the domestic normalcy of the scene -- a wasp sitting in an armchair, having a heart-to-heart with his human son -- treating interspecies adoption as an everyday family sitcom situation. The caption "Interspecies adoption is always difficult" delivers the final punch by treating this absurd scenario with deadpan understatement.
References
- Parasitoid wasps (such as species in the families Braconidae and Ichneumonidae) are real insects that reproduce by laying their eggs inside or on other insects, often caterpillars, which they first paralyze with a sting. The larvae then consume the host from the inside.