Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Oh no.

2015-06-22 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
Oh no.
Votey panel for Oh no.
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

A mother and daughter come across what appears to be a dead man lying upside down on the ground with his eyes wide open. The child says "Oh no!" and the mother tries to reassure her by saying "He's just, uh... sleeping." The child then points out increasingly damning evidence: he's upside down, his eyes are wide open, ants are making a blanket over him, a coyote is fighting the ants over who gets to pick at him, and vultures are circling. The mother keeps insisting he's just a "sound sleeper" and that the vultures "will re-associate him after his nap."

The Humor

The comic satirizes the classic parental instinct to shield children from the concept of death by offering increasingly absurd euphemisms and denials. The humor escalates as each new piece of evidence makes it more and more undeniable that the person is dead — coyotes and vultures are literally scavenging the body — yet the mother stubbornly maintains the fiction that he's merely sleeping. The phrase "re-associate him" (instead of acknowledging the vultures are going to eat him) is a particularly funny bit of desperate parental spin. It's a commentary on how parents sometimes go to ridiculous lengths to preserve childhood innocence.

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