from jmcandrew, who asks, “Does this qualify as a geezer comic now for people who remember when long distance communication was prohibitively expensive?”
See, kids, back in the day…ok, yeah, definitely geezer alert time.
I collect what I call “obsolete jokes”: jokes that are no longer funny because technology—not the Zeitgeist—has passed them by. (The latter are common–consider most political humor, whose half-life is often quite short.)
One of these jokes involves a family eating dinner; the phone rings and the maid answers. She listens, says “Sure is!” and hangs up. A minute later it rings again, same story. After the third time, the master of the house asks her, “What’s with the phone calls?” and she explains, “Some joker keeps calling, saying ‘Long distance from New York’!”
One thing I particularly enjoy about these is the often multiple layers of obsolescence. For example with this one we have: family eating together; landline; maid (!); and of course the actual punchline.
Comics I Don't Understand 
A two-hour conference call between the U.S. and London would still be quite expensive (although much less so than when this was published, at least on an inflation-adjusted basis). I was violently reminded of this a few years ago when I accidentally had an hour-long call with my daughter in Australia. Normally we use FaceTime, which uses an internet rather than a telephone connection and is free.
But isn’t this comic backward? The kid would have used an internet based phone, and there would be no charge, no matter where in the world he called. No kid his age doesn’t know how to use the internet.
And it should be the adult who was worried about the charges, not the kid.
Oh, right, this wasn’t published years ago, it’s recent. Chai is right, of course.
Sorry, Chak, not Chai. Autocorrect strikes again.
Teddy and Wally will probably be paying roaming charges, but not this kid.
I went to New Zealand as an exchange student in the early 2010s. Every time I called home, my parents always hung up in less than one minute. It turns out they thought I was spending hundreds of dollars on long-distance calls when in fact I was calling by Skype at a really low rate.
Do you remember the minor trickery of a family member traveling, who would place a collect or person-to-person call from a pay phone after arriving safely, which the people at home base would decline? So nobody paid anything, but the call signaled the success of the trip. Or it could get fancy with a code for different names you would use.