Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Mommy

2021-10-28 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
Mommy
Votey panel for Mommy
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 is captioned "Top Parenting Lie This Year: Clown 'noses' are actually egg sacs."

A parent and child are at what appears to be a circus or carnival, looking at a large, somewhat unsettling clown. The parent says: "Ohhh! Isn't that cute! See, you can tell it's a Mommy clown."

The joke operates on two levels. First, it plays on the tradition of parents telling children absurd lies (like "the ice cream truck only plays music when it's out of ice cream"). Second, it takes the already unsettling nature of clowns and makes them dramatically more horrifying by suggesting their red noses are reproductive organs -- "egg sacs" -- implying clowns are some kind of biological organism that reproduces. The parent cheerfully pointing out a "Mommy clown" while the child presumably absorbs this nightmare fuel is the core of the humor. It satirizes how casually parents can traumatize children with made-up "facts."

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