paw-4
Explanation
This comic features the classic "Monkey's Paw" trope -- a cursed artifact that grants wishes but with terrible, ironic consequences. A man addresses the monkey's paw angrily: "Monkey's paw, I'm tired of everyone disrespecting me!" In the next panel, he makes his wish: "I wish for something bad to happen, and I don't care if my wishes have weird consequences!"
In the third panel, the monkey's paw curls a finger (the traditional visual signal that a wish has been granted). In the final panel, the monkey's paw is giving the man the middle finger.
The joke subverts the monkey's paw formula in a delightfully simple way. Normally, the horror of the monkey's paw comes from its twisted interpretation of seemingly reasonable wishes. Here, the man has preemptively surrendered all leverage by (1) not actually wishing for respect, but instead wishing for "something bad to happen," and (2) explicitly saying he doesn't care about weird consequences. The paw, perhaps insulted by the man's rudeness or simply taking the path of least resistance, grants the most minimal and direct "bad thing" it can -- it flips him off. The man who wanted to stop being disrespected has now been disrespected by the magical artifact itself. It is also a visual pun on the paw "curling a finger," which is usually depicted as a finger folding down to mark a wish used, but here becomes an obscene gesture instead.