Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

come-from

2022-04-29 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
come-from
Votey panel for come-from
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic plays on the awkwardness of the "where do babies come from" conversation between parent and child.

In the first panel, a child asks her mother "Mom, where do I come from?" The mother nervously says "Uhhhh... a cabbage patch."

The second panel shows the father's much more elaborate (and alarming) version: "Your father and I were in a cabbage patch doing something about 'the glamour and the evil' and 'the life growing in every corner' and 'AAAAAHHHH found my neck wedged screaming YOU MADE US EAT OF THE...'" -- the father's story has devolved into some kind of horrifying cosmic/religious narrative.

In the third panel, the father simply says "Dad said it was a stork." The child, now hearing a third contradictory story, responds: "I guess you came from either a cabbage patch, the stork, or the alleyway behind the zoo."

The mother, embarrassed, replies: "We did once get busy behind the zoo, didn't we?" and then says "I would like to re-answer the question."

The humor works through escalation of awkwardness. Each answer to the child's innocent question gets worse: the cabbage patch (a classic deflection), the stork (another classic), and then the accidental revelation that the child may have literally been conceived behind a zoo. The father's bizarre, horror-tinged version of events in panel two adds an extra layer of absurdity. The mother's final desire to "re-answer" the question acknowledges that every attempt to handle this conversation has made it progressively worse.

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