2011-02-28
Explanation
In this comic, a man tells a woman that he couldn't sleep and was trying to come up with an evolutionary explanation for why humans tend to be monogamous, noting that from a gene's perspective, monogamy makes no sense in his models. The "Moments Prior" panel then reveals the context: his wife caught him awake at 3 AM and demanded to know why he was up.
The joke works on two levels. On the surface, it's funny that the man frames his insomnia as a lofty intellectual pursuit in evolutionary biology when he was really just caught doing something suspicious at 3 AM. On a deeper level, the comic implies that his wife suspects he was up to something nefarious (perhaps looking at something on his computer), and his hastily constructed "research" into why monogamy doesn't make evolutionary sense is an inadvertently incriminating cover story -- essentially arguing that humans aren't naturally monogamous to the very person who would most want him to be monogamous. The humor lies in how his attempt at an innocent explanation actually makes things worse.