2011-01-27
Explanation
This comic uses a bait-and-switch structure built around an elderly grandmother and a bag of rubber bands. In the first few panels, the grandmother is shown holding a bag labeled "Rubber Bands," then struggling mightily to stretch one of the rubber bands -- grunting "Hrrngh..." and "Guurrgh!" -- before finally pulling it taut across her face and screaming "MAAAA AAAH!" The visual setup makes it look like she is simply having a difficult time with an ordinary household task, perhaps trying to use a rubber band for some craft or practical purpose.
The punchline arrives in the final panel, where a young woman (presumably the grandmother'''s granddaughter) exclaims, "Okay, Grandma! I promise -- no unprotected sex!" and the grandmother calmly replies, "Good girl." The joke recontextualizes everything: the grandmother was not struggling with rubber bands for some innocent purpose. She was deliberately performing an agonizing demonstration of how painful and annoying rubber bands are in order to terrify her granddaughter into practicing safe sex -- "rubber" being a well-known slang term for condom. The grandmother'''s over-the-top physical ordeal was essentially an avant-garde safe-sex lecture.
The votey panel adds a melancholy coda: the grandmother says, "It'''s sad that I'''ll never be a grandma," to which someone replies, "You'''re weird." This is a paradoxical joke -- she already IS a grandma, but her safe-sex advocacy is so effective that she seems to have convinced herself (or is lamenting) that her grandchildren will never have children of their own, thus she will never be a great-grandmother. The "you'''re weird" response captures the absurdity of the whole scenario.