When I was young, my family had a newspaper subscription. Every morning my brother and I would turn it to the comics page, and we would read our two favorite comics—Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side. On most mornings, this would then result in a twenty-minute period where my mother explained what various words meant, and (in the case of more than a few Far Side comics) why something was funny. One I remember in particular (I must’ve been six or seven at the time) had the punch line: “How entomologists pass away.” This led to a discussion on how a bug curls up its legs when it dies, what an entomologist is, and how those concepts were glued together in a funny way.

Recently this came full circle when I sent my brother a T-shirt that featured a number of sentient cartoon marshmallows roasting one of their unlucky comrades over a bonfire while other marshmallows fiendishly readied the chocolate and graham crackers. The first day that my brother wore the shirt, he got to explain to his young children why cannibalism was (in this instance) funny.