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Transcript:

Charlie Brown sits on the pavement eating from a bag.

Patty walks up to him and says, "What's this you're eating and not sharing with me?"

He replies, "Sweetmeats!"

She walks off saying, "I could have sworn he was eating candy!?"

Original comic:

I thought that was just his nickname for you!

The joke is that sweetmeats are a type of confectionary?

Fun fact: "meat" ("mete") originally just meant "food" in Old English, and included the "animal fodder" sense.

What we would call meat was originally "flesh-meat" until around 1300, when the modern meaning of "animal flesh food" took over the majority of the usage of the word.

However, when words shift in meaning over time, it's common for the original sense of the word to hang around in compound words. So, "sweetmeat" still retains this older meaning: "sweet food > candy".

Thanks, that is a fun fact! Somewhat related, I recently learned that -mal from German as in einmal stuck around in English as -meal, but only in really one word, piecemeal. Wiktionary lists a few other words with it, but I've never heard of them.