Scrufles
Explanation
The Joke
The comic shows a person greeting a dog: "Scruffles! You look so good!" Then they lavish attention on the dog: "Oh Scruffles, go, you eat your food, look at you, no wonder you've got those beautiful eyes." In an earlier timeline panel labeled "Earlier," we see the same person talking about their pet: "Scruffles is like..." The final panel delivers the punchline, with the dog apparently thinking or someone noting: "They've been alive two years and they already act like us."
The comic plays on the way humans baby-talk and fawn over their dogs, treating them with exaggerated affection and compliments. The twist is that from the dog's perspective (or perhaps from the perspective of an older, more jaded pet), humans are the ones behaving like simple, excitable creatures -- the exact way humans often view dogs.
The Humor
The comic inverts the typical human-pet relationship dynamic. Humans tend to think of themselves as the sophisticated ones condescending to love their simple pets, but the comic suggests that our over-the-top, gushing behavior around dogs -- the baby talk, the excessive compliments, the food excitement -- actually makes us look like the simple, predictable creatures. The role reversal is the core comedic technique: the dog observing that humans have only been around a couple of years (in the dog's perception of the relationship) and are already acting like pets themselves.
References
The comic plays on the well-documented phenomenon of "pet-directed speech," which is similar to baby talk and involves higher pitch, exaggerated intonation, and simplified vocabulary. Studies have shown that humans universally adopt this speaking pattern with dogs.