2010-10-22
Explanation
This comic is titled "Movies have a lot of bad science. How come there's never bad math?" It imagines what a disaster movie would look like if it were based on mathematical errors instead of scientific ones. A scientist named Stan bursts through a door to warn Sally that they need to get out of the city. When asked why, he delivers the alarming news: "Two... has mutated." Sally looks out the window at a dark, ominous cityscape, then turns back in horror as Stan gravely announces: "Into three."
The joke plays on the tropes of disaster and horror movies where some biological or chemical agent "mutates" into a dangerous new form. Here, the "mutation" is the number 2 becoming the number 3 -- a mathematical impossibility presented with all the dramatic weight of a zombie outbreak or nuclear meltdown. The comic satirizes both the bad science commonly found in Hollywood films and the way movies treat mundane concepts as existentially threatening through dramatic framing. The panels are drawn with genuine cinematic tension -- dark lighting, worried expressions, dramatic reveals -- all in service of something completely nonsensical.
The votey panel adds an additional layer with Stan asking "Hey... wanna have a twosome?" Since two has mutated into three, a "twosome" would now actually be a threesome -- turning the mathematical absurdity into a crude innuendo and revealing that Stan might have an ulterior motive for sharing this particular piece of bad-math news.