tangled
Explanation
The Joke
The comic shows a classic fairy tale scene: a figure (resembling a prince or rescuer) is climbing a tower using long hair let down from a window, in the style of the Rapunzel story. As the climber ascends, they call up: "Hey, what're you in here for anyway?" The person in the tower responds: "Embezzlement, why?" The caption below reads: "How come nobody ever asks WHY the princess is in the tower?"
The joke reframes the Rapunzel story by treating the tower not as a place of captive innocence but as a prison -- and revealing that the "princess" is locked up for a perfectly legitimate criminal reason. The rescuer has been so focused on the heroic act of climbing the tower that they never thought to ask the most basic question: what did this person do to end up locked in a tower in the first place?
The Humor
The humor works by applying common-sense questioning to a fairy tale trope that audiences have always accepted without scrutiny. In the original Rapunzel story, the imprisonment is presented as cruel and unjust, and the prince's rescue is heroic. But the comic points out that in any other context, if someone is locked in a tower, you would naturally ask why. The answer -- embezzlement, a distinctly modern and unglamorous white-collar crime -- is the perfect anti-climax to the romantic fairy tale setup. It also plays on the broader trend in comedy and media of deconstructing fairy tales by asking the obvious questions that the original stories conveniently ignore.
References
The comic references the fairy tale of Rapunzel, collected by the Brothers Grimm, in which a young woman is imprisoned in a tower by an enchantress and lets down her long hair for a prince to climb. The title "tangled" is also a nod to Disney's 2010 animated film Tangled, which is a retelling of the Rapunzel story.