Funny
Explanation
The Joke
The comic features a conversation between two parents about a website that collects funny things kids say. One parent excitedly shows the site to the other, who pushes back: "Kids don't say funny things. We do." The second parent then explains this perspective across several panels.
The argument goes like this: when we ask a little kid what 5 and 7 is and they say "two-teen," we laugh because they are trying to regularize language -- applying logical rules (like the "-teen" suffix pattern) consistently. But the parent points out that kids don't say "went" -- they say "goed" -- because "goed" actually makes more sense given how English grammar usually works. The parent then asks us to imagine being surrounded by giants who control everything about our lives and who insist that the various tenses of "walk" are "walk, walking, skloop" and that we are precious for thinking otherwise. The argument culminates in the observation that kids start off functional and logical, and we adjust them until they are broken, just like how countries do not get along and we shake our heads rather than admitting that we are all crazy.
Despite this passionate defense of children's linguistic logic, the final panel shows the other parent cracking up at a toddler calling poop "butt-tato," and the first parent cannot help but laugh too.
The Humor
The comic works on two levels simultaneously. The intellectual argument is genuinely compelling -- children's "errors" often reveal them applying rules more consistently and logically than the arbitrary exceptions of actual English. This creates a thought-provoking commentary on language and society. But the punchline brilliantly undercuts the entire sermon: no matter how right the argument is, a toddler calling poop "butt-tato" is objectively hilarious, and even the person making the high-minded argument cannot resist laughing. The comic acknowledges that both things can be true at once -- kids are being logical, AND the results are funny.
References
The comic touches on concepts from linguistics, specifically morphological overgeneralization -- the well-documented phenomenon where children apply regular grammatical rules to irregular forms (saying "goed" instead of "went," or "mouses" instead of "mice"). This is actually considered a sign of sophisticated language acquisition rather than an error, as it demonstrates the child has learned the underlying rule. Linguists like Steven Pinker have written extensively about this phenomenon, notably in "Words and Rules" (1999).