> Wait, maybe the punchline is something like: "We don’t have any fish in the tea, but we do have a lot of krill."

Shucks, it was so close to coming up with a good punchline it could work back from.

I'm thinking set it in a single-cell comic. A downtrodden young man or woman sitting alone at a table, a pelican in the background clearly making drinks in its voluminous beak, and the walrus waiter places a cup in front of the person, consolingly saying "there's plenty of fish in the tea".