It's funny because it's a mindless application of a standard reply to someone asking one to do something difficult: ``first do it yourself, then ask others to do it.'' The intellectual, the stereotypically absent-minded ``scholastic'', hasn't considered that in this particular case he is asking to be killed. And I suppose it's a bonus that he can't possibly do anything when he's dead.

From a 1922 translation:

A father advised a pedant who had a child born to him of a slave woman to do away with the child. He replied "First bury your own children before you advise me to do away with mine."

You could probabaly make it a little more sarcastic: "Why don't you bury..." I assume the pedant is an adult, and cannot be killed lawfully, so burial is way off in the future. And once the pedant is buried, he cannot kill his own child.

It rings a little like a more vulgar versions of the saying of Jesus, "remove the plank from your own eye..."

Because it’s impossible. He couldn’t do what his father is asking if he’s dead.

> The intellectual replied: "First murder your own children and then tell me to kill mine!"

Sounds like a clever way to say: "Over my dead body." Considering he's saying this to his own father.

In these jokes, is the word intellectual meant to be a substitute for “smartass”?

Given some context (another top comment has some jokes from the Philogelos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30838277 ), I believe it actually means student.

The jokes often reference their parents or classmates.

It made the joke above make sense to me, once I realized that.

It is funny because the squirrel gets dead.

I think that the joke is that the intellectual himself, and all of his siblings, were born from a slave.