Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

dadnapping

2021-12-28 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
dadnapping
Votey panel for dadnapping
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 is a four-panel comic about a kidnapping phone call gone wrong.

Panel 1: A menacing bald figure calls someone and says, "I have kidnapped your father and you will pay the ransom or never see him again."

Panel 2: The person on the phone (a curly-haired individual) responds skeptically: "Liar! Say something only my dad would say."

Panel 3: The kidnapper relays the request to the captive father, who responds with deadpan literalness: "He says 'something only my dad would say.'"

Panel 4: The person on the phone, hearing this unhelpfully literal response, says: "Go ahead and kill him."

The humor is a classic "dad joke" setup -- the father's response is technically correct (he did say "something only my dad would say") but completely useless as proof of identity. The child's exasperated reaction of telling the kidnapper to go ahead and kill the father is the punchline, suggesting that this kind of infuriating literal-mindedness is so characteristic of their dad that it both proves his identity AND makes the child not want him back. The title "dadnapping" is a portmanteau of "dad" and "kidnapping."

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