road
Explanation
This is a concise, single-panel style comic (with a caption below) about linguists. Someone delivers tragic news: "It's... I'm so sorry. Your parents were on the road and a truck just ran them over." The listener begins to react with shock -- "Oh my God!" -- but the news-bearer continues, "Yeah, they just--"
Before they can finish, the listener (a linguist) interrupts with excitement: "Did you pronounce 'road' as a diphthong? Say it again! Where are you from?" The linguist has become completely distracted from the devastating personal news by a fascinating phonological observation about the speaker's dialect.
The caption reads: "It's very hard to give linguists bad news." The joke is about the stereotype of linguists being so obsessively interested in language and pronunciation that they cannot help but analyze speech patterns, even in the most emotionally inappropriate moments. A diphthong is a vowel sound that glides from one position to another (like the "oa" in some pronunciations of "road"), and the linguist's excitement about detecting one completely overrides their grief response.