wonder
Explanation
The Joke
A man reminisces about how his dad always took him out on clear nights to look at the sky. He can still hear his father saying: "Don't look at the spot on Jupiter. It looks like a nipple. The Devil's gland." He says this always filled him with wonder. In the final panels, a child asks: "When do I get to meet Grandpa, anyway?" The man replies: "I need you to be old enough for him to be dead."
The Humor
The comic sets up a warm, nostalgic scene of a parent sharing the wonder of astronomy with a child — a wholesome trope in comics and film. But the father's actual words are bizarre and inappropriate: calling Jupiter's Great Red Spot a "nipple" and "the Devil's gland" is the opposite of the inspiring, educational narration one expects. Despite this, the narrator still treasures these memories as filling him with "wonder," suggesting either he did not understand how strange his father was, or that childhood wonder is so powerful it can transform even nonsensical input into magic. The final punchline adds a dark twist: when the child asks to meet Grandpa, the man says he needs the child to be old enough for Grandpa to have died — implying the grandfather is so embarrassing or inappropriate that the man does not want his child to actually meet him, and would prefer to only share sanitized (or at least selectively recalled) memories of him.