2010-03-27

A four-panel comic at a dinner table. A young man eating with chopsticks tells his gray-haired father that now the kids are out of the house, Dad should finally get that science degree he always wanted. The dad demurs: it'd be silly, since all the great thinkers made their greatest contributions in their 20s, and the son agrees. But then the son rattles off a huge list of exceptions, ironically undercutting the dad's claim: 'Well, except Hemingway, Einstein, Feynman, Descartes, Schrodinger, Mendel, Mendeleev, Shakespeare, Babbage, Pope, Spinoza, Turing, Fermi, Joyce, Bach, Faraday, Aquinas, and Galileo.' The son concedes, 'That's... actually a very good thought.' The twist: the dad, head down and writing, deadpans 'Well, I'm in my 20s' — revealing the son is actually a small child and the 'dad' is the young one. In the votey (black-and-white aftercomic), the son adds 'Except Weiner,' and the dad replies, 'Ah... the world's greatest phallic-omedian,' a pun on a comedian named Weiner.