Scott Meyer’s Basic Instructions is usually funny, but this strip also has a touch of actual phonics. Or maybe I should say “phonetics.” The word of interest is in the second panel; it’s “schwa.”
The schwa looks like an upside-down lowercase e. That’s ə. You won’t find it in your ASCII chart, though. You have to use html or something else to make it, such as find it on a web page someplace, and do a copy and paste. The decimal html schwa is “ə” and if you prefer hexadecimal, it’s “ə” but enough of this technical stuff.
Just recognize that that upside-down e us pronounced “uh,” like the right-side up “e” in “the.”