Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

frog-prince

2019-03-06 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
frog-prince
Votey panel for frog-prince
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

The Joke

The comic is a twist on the classic fairy tale of the Frog Prince. A queen tells a king "Honey, it's all over." When the king asks "What?", she reminds him of the time she kissed a frog and it turned into a prince. The king confirms "Yeah!" -- indicating he is that former frog prince. The queen then reveals the devastating biological consequence: since he was a frog for a long time (okay, "a long, long, long time"), he has fathered 1,000 offspring. The king can only manage a stunned "I... oh."

The joke takes the romantic fairy tale premise and follows it to its logical biological conclusion. Frogs reproduce by laying enormous numbers of eggs, so a being that spent most of its life as a frog would presumably have frog-level reproductive output. The fairy tale conveniently ignores what the prince was doing during all those years as a frog, and this comic fills in that gap in the most uncomfortable way possible.

The Humor

The comedy comes from the collision between fairy tale logic and biological reality. Fairy tales ask us to accept that a frog can become a prince through a kiss, but they never address the messy details of what the frog was up to before the transformation. The comic exploits this by pointing out that frogs are prolific breeders, meaning the prince likely has a staggering number of frog offspring somewhere out there. The queen's matter-of-fact delivery and the king's horrified realization make the punchline land -- this is a marital bombshell delivered with the weight of someone revealing an affair, except the "affair" was just being a frog doing normal frog things.

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