fairytale
Explanation
This comic shows an adult reading a fairy tale to a group of young children. The text being read aloud is the gruesome ending of the original Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella: "And for their wickedness and falsehood, God sent down crows who pecked out the stepsisters' eyes. They lived out their days in shame and misery."
The children's reaction is enthusiastic: "YAYYYYYYY!" The caption below reads: "Focus-group testing fairytale endings on children was a mistake."
The joke works on multiple levels. First, there's the historical fact that the original Grimm fairy tales were genuinely violent and horrifying -- the Disney versions we know today are heavily sanitized. The comic imagines a scenario where someone tries to "focus-group test" these original endings on their target audience (children) to see how they land. The children's gleeful reaction to graphic eye-gouging is the punchline: kids don't react with horror as adults might expect, but with delight. The "mistake" isn't that the children were traumatized -- it's that they loved it, which means the focus group has validated keeping the gruesome content in, leading to the uncomfortable conclusion that children are natural enthusiasts of cartoon violence and cruelty.