2012-01-08
Explanation
This comic features a bearded man and a red-haired woman engaging in a rapid-fire philosophical dialogue. The woman asks a series of big questions -- "What is science?", "What is philosophy?", "What is religion?", "What is life?", "What is beauty?" -- and the man provides answers that are all built around the concept of induction (the philosophical principle of deriving general rules from specific observations). Science is "the belief that induction is real," philosophy is "the fear that induction is impossible," religion is "the faith that it isn''t," life is "the duration of those three," and beauty is "the highest use of that duration."
The answers form an elegant, interconnected system that builds from epistemology to metaphysics to aesthetics, each definition flowing logically from the last. It reads almost like a genuine philosophical framework. But the punchline deflates all this intellectual grandeur: when the woman asks "What are you doing right now?" the final panel shows her browsing a website called "Celeb-Gossip" while saying "I''ll get to beauty later!" The joke is that even someone capable of articulating such profound definitions of beauty and life still succumbs to the most trivial distractions -- celebrity gossip -- revealing the gap between philosophical ideals and lived behavior.
The votey panel jumps forward "73 years later" and shows the woman as an elderly person on her deathbed thinking "Just one more advice animal" -- a reference to the internet meme format popular around 2012. She never did get to beauty; she spent her entire life consuming trivial internet content instead, which is both funny and existentially bleak.