2009-09-24
Explanation
This comic features an elderly grandfather lecturing a young boy on a couch. The grandfather complains: "When I was your age, women wore overcoats and gloves to go out. Now you got tramps and filthy whores on every corner!" The caption below reads: "Ugh. Another of Grampa's lectures about how hard life used to be."
The humor lies in the mismatch between the framing and the content. The caption sets up the expectation that the grandfather is delivering one of those tiresome "back in my day, things were tougher" speeches that elderly relatives are stereotypically known for. But the actual complaint reveals the opposite -- he is lamenting that women today dress more revealingly than in his era. From the grandson's perspective, this is a complaint about how life has become easier (or at least more enjoyable), not harder. The grandfather clearly views this as moral decline, but the joke is that most young men would consider this an improvement, making the "how hard life used to be" framing delightfully ironic.
The votey panel extends the joke 100 years into the future, where an old man tells a youngster: "When I was your age, it took several minutes to download a virtual orgy!" This projects the same generational complaint structure forward, suggesting that every generation will find some way to complain about how easy the next generation has it regarding access to sexual content, and that what counts as a hardship is always relative.