2011-12-29
Explanation
This comic is titled "Reductionism: The Ultimate Form of Sarcasm." A man gives his wife flowers for their wedding anniversary, but describes the gesture in the most clinically reductive terms possible: "Please let these plant genitals indicate my remorse for forgetting that Earth has gone around the sun five times since we agreed to legal pair bonding."
The humor lies in how scientific reductionism strips all romance and sentiment from what is meant to be a loving gesture. Flowers become "plant genitals" (which is botanically accurate -- flowers are indeed the reproductive organs of plants), a wedding anniversary becomes an orbital count, and marriage becomes "legal pair bonding." By reducing every element to its most literal, biological, or physical description, the statement becomes inadvertently hostile and sarcastic, even though it's technically accurate. The comic illustrates how meaning, emotion, and social significance are emergent properties that disappear when you describe things at too low a level of abstraction.