2011-05-20
Explanation
This comic plays on the old saying "money can't buy happiness." A bank teller completes a transaction and asks a customer if she would like to purchase some happiness. She declines, citing the familiar truism. The teller then introduces "Happy Bucks" -- a currency that can be exchanged for regular money at any time and carries no social stigma for wanting lots of them. When asked if Happy Bucks can buy happiness, the teller points out that there is no truism saying they cannot. The woman enthusiastically agrees to buy ten thousand.
The joke exposes the logical absurdity of the saying "money can't buy happiness" by creating a simple workaround. If Happy Bucks are freely convertible to money, they are functionally identical to money -- yet because the proverb specifically mentions "money," a technically different-but-equivalent currency sidesteps the supposed prohibition. The comic satirizes how people treat folk sayings and truisms as if they were binding rules of the universe, rather than loose observations. It also pokes fun at the human tendency to find loopholes in principles we claim to believe in.