Here’s a Reality Check from Stan, who says ” A couple of things didn’t quite scan with this for me. If that bubble is what I assume it is, I don’t think he’d need to be ‘told’. Also, why are the fish wearing regal headgear?”
And the squirrel didn’t have anything to say?
Comics I Don't Understand 
Those aren’t crowns, it’s the artist’s attempt at dorsal fins. And I guess he figures fish don’t have a sense of smell? (Of course, how they’re surviving in water so soapy that bubbles will leave the surface is an entire other question….)
why don’t fish smell? … because they don’t have noses
But fish do smell, and of course it’s a 1-second search to find that out. And since the joke depends on that misapprehension, it’s just kinda dumb.
Here’s what I think of as the foundational form of that joke:
And the answer does implicitly know that fish (when alive and in their element) do have a sense of smell.
The squirrel was off duty and replaced by those two witness fish down in the corner.
Eh… many times we find ourselves or someone else in a situation where if they understood the entirety of it they’d probably be wigged out. Sometimes it is funny to be the omniscient outsider able to see the crazy situation. It helps to not expect 100% reality in your cartoons. Can’t say I got a chuckle out of this, but the joke seems obvious.
“It helps to not expect 100% reality in your cartoons. Can’t say I got a chuckle out of this, but the joke seems obvious.”
True enough, but the fundamental premise seems utterly flawed to me. As for not expecting reality in a cartoon, I can accept that the fish are speaking, and that one of them is floating and excited about being airborne, but how on Earth could he be in a fart bubble and not know it? That seems that the entire ‘joke’ hinges on this, and I’m not sure it works, suspension of disbelief or otherwise.
Stan, it sounds like a metaphor for life, doesn’t it? We’re all stuck in a fart bubble and don’t know it, aren’t we?
It’s all so clear to me now…
Not to be too obvious, but … the fish in in a gaseous environment. So it’s giggling happily as it suffocates. Even if it’s a lungfish, armored catfish, or paradise fish (all breathe air) the gas in that bubble isn’t air, so ….
Carl Fink, I like that! What the two other fish want to tell him is that he is slowly asphyxiating and is bound to die as he brain cells implode, rather than he’s being held aloft by a fart. I like it! It’s dark, but it’s much, much funnier than what I assumed the artist was going for. And no, I am not being sarcastic in the least. Seriously. I now like this comic!
It seems to me in animated cartoons or old comedy films there are protagonists who are unaware of the situation they’re caught up in, for laughs, though it’s obvious to the viewer. This comic is similar.
I think they’re wearing crowns because they’re Kingfish. Except for the one that is either a princess fish or queenfish.
I Googled kingfish, and only one link, actually half a link, was to the actual animal. It was a sublink for Wikipedia; the main link was the “disambiguation” page.