Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

the-shire

2017-08-23 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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the-shire
Votey panel for the-shire
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

The Joke

A father is reading a bedtime story to his child, describing a "full-sized hobbit house" like in The Lord of the Rings, complete with a round door, windows into a valley, and a working fireplace. The child repeatedly interrupts: "Daddy, I don't like those books," "I don't want to live in a hobbit house." The father ignores these protests entirely, rhapsodizing about hearths and no one coming for the ring. The child finally confronts him: "You built this for you!" The father sheepishly admits: "Well, I did use your college fund, so technically we are co-owners."

The joke is about a parent who uses the pretense of doing something "for the children" to justify indulging his own fantasy -- in this case, building a hobbit house from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. The child sees through the charade immediately, recognizing that the father is projecting his own nerdy obsessions. The final punchline twists the knife further: not only did the father build this for himself, but he raided his child's college fund to do it and has the audacity to frame this as a co-ownership arrangement.

The Humor

The humor works through the relatable dynamic of geeky parents inflicting their passions on uninterested children. Every parent who has tried to share their favorite childhood franchise with a kid who could not care less will recognize this dynamic. The comic escalates it to an absurd extreme -- instead of just making the kid watch the movies, this father has literally built a hobbit house with the child's college savings. The "co-owners" line is perfectly crafted comedy: it is simultaneously the father's attempt at a reasonable justification and a transparent admission of financial irresponsibility. The bottom caption notes this is a promotional comic for the book "Soonish."

References

The comic references J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, specifically the hobbit holes of the Shire, the idyllic homeland of hobbits characterized by round doors set into hillsides.

View History (1) Original Comic