2011-10-24
Explanation
This comic presents a graph showing "Primary Household Breadwinner" on the Y-axis and "Time" on the X-axis. Initially, the "men" line is high and dominant while the "women" line is low. Around the point marked "Invention of Internet," both lines begin to shift -- but then a third line suddenly spikes: "cats who do funny things on camera." This line briefly surpasses both men and women before eventually declining. The caption below reads: "How Culture Ends: Not with a bang... with a whisker."
The joke takes the real sociological trend of changing gender roles in household income and introduces an absurd third variable: internet cat videos. The comic suggests that the rise of viral cat content on the internet was so economically significant that cats briefly became the primary household breadwinners -- a humorous commentary on the enormous popularity and monetization of cat videos in internet culture.
The punchline "Not with a bang... with a whisker" is a play on T.S. Eliot'''s famous line from "The Hollow Men": "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper." By replacing "whimper" with "whisker," the comic suggests our civilization'''s decline will be driven by our obsession with cute cat content. The votey panel extends the joke, showing a man desperately telling his cat: "Do something cute! I need to pay rent!" -- depicting the logical endpoint of cats as breadwinners.