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Explanation
The Joke
A child asks his father why George Washington had false teeth. The father spins an absurd explanation: the false teeth were "decoy teeth" used as a combat strategy against the British. A Redcoat would punch Washington, thinking he had knocked out his teeth, but those were just the decoys. Then Washington would "activate his REAL teeth and go for the jugular" -- implying Washington would bite enemy soldiers to death.
When the child objects that Washington famously "could not tell a lie," the father counters that Washington did not actually say a lie -- his teeth did the deceiving. The child asks if he is sure, and the father delivers the final punchline: "Where do you think the phrase 'to lie through one's teeth' comes from?" The child is blown away by this fake etymology.
The Humor
The comic is a classic "dad explains history wrong" joke, a recurring SMBC format where a father gives a child a wildly fabricated but internally consistent explanation. The humor comes from the father weaving together multiple real facts and phrases -- Washington's false teeth, the cherry tree myth about not telling lies, and the idiom "to lie through one's teeth" -- into a single ridiculous narrative where each element "explains" the others. The child's credulity makes it funnier, as each objection is met with a response that makes the whole fabrication seem even more plausible.
The joke also works because the fake explanation turns Washington from the famously virtuous Founding Father into a terrifying feral combatant who uses dental prosthetics as a military deception strategy and bites people's throats. The escalation from "false teeth" to "jugular-biting attack strategy" is delightfully absurd.
References
George Washington's false teeth are a well-known historical fact. Contrary to popular myth, they were not made of wood but of various materials including ivory, gold, lead, and human and animal teeth. The legend that Washington "could not tell a lie" comes from the apocryphal cherry tree story, popularized by biographer Mason Locke Weems in 1806. The idiom "to lie through one's teeth" actually has no connection to Washington; it dates back to at least the 14th century and simply means to tell a blatant lie.