Bil Keane delights in the misery of children

I'm sure that most everyone has had a joke at the expense of (not necessarily because of) The Family Circus cartoon at one time or another, but this past Sunday's episode left me scratching my head for lack of an explanation as to exactly why it was funny.

After attempting to find the cartoon in question on the Family Circus website (whose designer, amusingly, misspells the cartoonist's name as "Bill" - check the metatext in the Google search results - and doesn't know how to escape frames properly), I'm forced to describe the cartoon instead.

Frame 1: one of the kids is making a "dribble castle" at the beach. A dribble castle, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, consists of digging a hole deep enough that you get below the water table, and get a fistful of sopping-wet mud. The mud is then allowed to dribble through your fingers, and you can slowly build up towers and walls that pretty much resemble the Sagrada Familia. At any rate, the kid in question is pretty far along in his masterpiece, which doesn't resemble the Spanish cathedral in question so much as it resembles a collapsed sheet cake.

Frame 2: The tide has come in, flattened the sheet-cake-castle only slightly, and (presumably) soaked the kid, who is sitting in the middle of a receding wave...bawling his eyes out.

Now, I can understand how this might be amusing in a Nelson Muntz point-and-laugh kind of way, but Bil Keane has never been one to rely on schadenfreude for his laughs. So Bil...wtf, dude?