Okay, so there’s a frog and a fly. It says “Frog Ophthalmology”, but it looks like the fly is the patient, so maybe it should be “Fly Ophthalmology”? Whatever, nevermind that.

So we’ve got a frog doctor, I think, and what is he doing with his tongue? Is his tongue vibrating up and down? These motion lines seem to indicate that his tongue is vibrating vertically:

But frogs’ tongues don’t move like that, right? Let’s assume that the artist meant the tongue to be flicking in and out, like frogs’ tongues do. Okay.

So we’ve got a frog doctor that’s tonguing a fly’s eyes. Don’t frogs eat flies? Why isn’t the frog eating the fly? Why is he treating him as a patient? I’ve never read this comic before, so maybe the frog and fly are recurring characters, and it’s wacky that they treat each other as equals? Naah, doesn’t look like it.

It looks like the fly is getting an eye exam, because he’s saying “worse, worse,” and that’s what you might say when your eye doctor is trying to determine your prescription, right? When they do that, though, isn’t the patient usually looking through the phoropter? Why does the comic explicity show a phoropter in the upper part of the frame, but then doesn’t have the fly looking through it?

Alright, I’m still confused why a fly would go to a frog doctor? Wouldn’t he be worried about the frog eating him? Maybe the fly is completely blind, so he doesn’t KNOW he’s at a frog doctor, but then how can he know his vision is “worse” if he’s that blind?

Wait, what’s he looking at, anyway? Isn’t he supposed to be looking at an eye chart? But instead he’s looking directly at a frog that’s flicking its tongue at him?

Oh, is this supposed to be, like, laser surgery? The frog’s tongue is a laser, I guess. But you don’t tell the doctor DURING laser surgery that he’s lasered you enough. Does the frog do this with all his patients, even if they’re not flies? I mean, I assume this frog doctor treats OTHER frogs, usually. So maybe a frog comes in and he’s like “laser my eyes while I tell you how it’s goin, doc”, and the frog doctor start licking the crap out of the frog patient’s eyes and he’s like “yeah, that’s good.”

But, there HAS to be some significance to the patient being a fly. So maybe the frog doctor NORMALLY does laser surgery with a laser, but since a fly suddenly came in, the frog doctor was like, “I’ll toy with this fly by tasting his eyeballs for a little while, and he’ll think I’m lasering him.” If so, then this scene really isn’t TYPICAL “Frog Ophthalmology” at all. It’s more “Frog Malpractice,” I guess.

So a frog tricks a maybe-blind fly to come in for an eye exam, and then instead of eating the fly, the frog tongues the fly’s eyes for a while, which the fly thinks will help his vision but instead it makes it slightly worse. And that’s called “Frog Ophtalmology”. And this comic is in newspapers. Can I start laughing at the joke now?

Thank you to Malki, who posts stuff like this on his twitter frequently.

-Drew

Kriss Straub‘s altered version makes far more sense.

UPDATE: Someone just linked me to this site. Another theory posited there: The frog is holding sticks in his mouth for some reason?