status-2
Explanation
This comic shows a father reading a bedtime story to his child from a book titled "Anthropologist Fairy Tales." The story he reads aloud goes: "And so the person or group abided by cultural norms and was rewarded with an appropriate level of status. The end."
The joke is a parody of the fairy tale genre filtered through the lens of cultural anthropology. Traditional fairy tales typically feature magical quests, heroic deeds, and dramatic moral lessons -- but an anthropologist, trained to study human societies dispassionately, would reduce all of those colorful narratives to their underlying social function. From an anthropological perspective, most fairy tales are really just stories about conforming to cultural expectations and receiving social rewards for doing so.
The humor lies in the comic's deflation of fairy tale magic into dry academic jargon. "The princess married the prince and lived happily ever after" becomes "the person abided by cultural norms and was rewarded with an appropriate level of status." It is technically an accurate summary of many fairy tales, but it strips away all the wonder and narrative pleasure, leaving only the cold sociological skeleton. The comedy also plays on the idea that an anthropologist parent would be so steeped in their discipline that even bedtime stories become field reports.