2012-03-10
Explanation
This is a long-form comic where a female student visits a professor'''s office, suggestively offering to do something for him if he'''ll change her grade. The professor, an elderly man who has been married for fifty years, is completely unimpressed. He sighs and launches into a monologue about what it takes to keep a bedroom interesting for fifty years of marriage.
His speech becomes increasingly dramatic and darkly poetic: he describes having done things "so unholy and bizarre" that merely explaining their relation to sex would take the student'''s entire college career. He says everything fair has been made foul, everything foul made fair, the sacred profaned and resanctified only to be desecrated again and again. Nothing could register as pleasure or pain anymore. The student, overwhelmed by this existential horror, decides she'''ll just study harder -- which the professor approves with a simple "Good."
The humor works on multiple levels. It subverts the sleazy "student offers favors for grades" trope by having the professor be so jaded from decades of marital experimentation that a young student'''s advances seem laughably tame. His monologue parodies both Shakespearean tragedy and Lovecraftian horror, treating long-term married intimacy as something that has pushed him beyond the boundaries of human experience. The votey panel delivers one final punchline: later at home, the professor tells his wife he'''s feeling amorous, and she responds "I'''ll get the waffle iron" -- confirming that their bedroom activities have indeed ventured into absurdly unconventional territory.