Considered your approach to the joke, but I don’t think that’s it. “Phones bad” is so prevalent that the author must be aware of it, if they wanted to make a meta joke about a fisher being fished (which is pretty good imo) they would have used literally anything else as the bait. Using a phone and making it blatantly explicit with the speech bubble reduces any subtlety in the cartoon to “phones bad”.
Considered your approach to the joke, but I don’t think that’s it. “Phones bad” is so prevalent that the author must be aware of it, if they wanted to make a meta joke about a fisher being fished (which is pretty good imo) they would have used literally anything else as the bait. Using a phone and making it blatantly explicit with the speech bubble reduces any subtlety in the cartoon to “phones bad”.