2011-03-06
Explanation
This comic presents three vignettes under the headings "Don't Marry a Philosopher," "Don't Marry a Scientist," and "Don't Marry an Artist," each showing a deathbed confession scene. The philosopher tells his wife that since freedom of choice is meaningless in a deterministic reality, he never loved her in a way she'd find "existentially satisfying." The scientist tells his wife that there is no empirical difference between the atoms of living and non-living entities, so she shouldn't think of his death as "goodbye" but rather as "none of it ever mattered."
The first two segments set up a pattern of intellectuals using their fields of expertise to deliver devastatingly cold and detached final words to their spouses. The philosopher invokes determinism to undermine the meaning of their love, while the scientist uses materialism to deny any significance to life and death. Both are funny because they take legitimate intellectual positions and apply them in the most emotionally inappropriate context possible.
The third segment subverts the pattern entirely. Instead of an artist using aesthetic theory to deliver a similarly cerebral gut-punch, the artist simply confesses to infidelity with "dumb college girls." The humor lies in the contrast: while the philosopher and scientist were cruel in sophisticated, abstract ways, the artist is crude and direct, playing on the stereotype of artists as hedonistic and unfaithful rather than intellectual.