2010-07-01
Explanation
This comic plays with the classic sci-fi trope of identifying which of two identical people is a robot impostor. A woman holds a gun and faces two identical red-haired men, declaring she cannot tell which is the robot and which is her real husband. She demands they say something only her husband would know. One of them blurts out: "You have REALLY bad ass acne." The final panel, labeled "Later...," shows the woman happily serving the surviving man a battery on a tray, asking "Would you like another battery, honey?" He responds "Affirmative."
The joke has a sharp double twist. The man who proved he was the real husband -- by knowing an embarrassing, intimate detail about his wife -- was the one she shot. She chose to keep the robot instead, because the robot would not know (or at least would not mention) humiliating personal facts about her. The real husband'''s knowledge of her flaws was precisely what made living with the robot more appealing. The scene of her contentedly serving batteries to her new robot husband while he responds in mechanical language ("Affirmative") underscores that she is fully aware of her choice and perfectly happy with it.
The votey panel shows a graph with "Intellectualism in SMBC" on the Y-axis and "Time" on the X-axis. The line trends steadily upward until the point labeled "Use of term '''ass acne'''" where it plummets dramatically. This is a self-deprecating meta-joke by the author, acknowledging that the comic'''s crude humor represents a sudden and catastrophic drop in the strip'''s intellectual aspirations.