2010-10-15
Explanation
This comic features an alien accompanying a human man at what appears to be a bar or social venue, trying to help him find a mate. The alien keeps pointing out human women and asking "What about this human female?" and the man rejects each one, but his reasons -- when examined closely -- are absurdly reductive scientific descriptions of perfectly normal human preferences.
He rejects the first woman because "her weight is more than two standard deviations above average." He rejects the second because "her shirt implies that she likes syncopated improvisational rhythmic noise made by plucking strings" (i.e., jazz music) whereas he prefers "regular phrase structures in rhythmic noise made by forcing air through a metal cone" (i.e., pop or classical music played with brass instruments). He rejects a third because "her genetic lineage diverged from mine 7,000 years ago due to a brief geographical separation" -- meaning she's of a slightly different ethnic background. He then spots a red-haired woman and says "Ooh! She looks nice." When the alien asks why, he explains that during his formative years he had a red-haired babysitter whose left nipple he saw through a keyhole for 14 seconds.
The alien, appalled, asks "Don't judge me! What metric do you guys use?" and the alien responds "Longterm personality compatibility," at which the man laughs hysterically. The joke is a multi-layered satire of human mate selection: when you strip away the social niceties, human attraction is driven by arbitrary physical preferences, cultural biases, and formative experiences rather than anything rational -- and the idea of actually choosing partners based on personality compatibility is treated as laughably alien. The votey adds a final punchline with the alien character simply noting "Also boobs," acknowledging one more superficial criterion.