2012-06-22
Explanation
The comic is titled "Eventually, Everything Is Normal." In the first panel, a man is horrified, shouting the famous line from the 1973 film Soylent Green: "Soylent Green is PEOPLE. PEEEEEOPLE!" -- echoing Charlton Heston's iconic, anguished delivery of the film's twist ending. In the second panel, labeled "Later...," the same man is calmly eating Soylent Green from a package and his complaint has shifted to: "Soylent Green is people. High cholesterol peeeeople!"
The joke plays on the psychological concept of normalization -- the idea that even the most shocking or horrifying revelations eventually become mundane when people are exposed to them long enough. The man has moved past his moral outrage about cannibalism and has graduated to ordinary consumer complaints about the nutritional content of the product. The humor is dark and absurdist, suggesting that humans are capable of adapting to and accepting virtually anything given enough time, reducing even the horror of eating human flesh to the level of reading a nutrition label. It also functions as a broader commentary on how society often processes scandals and atrocities: initial outrage gives way to resigned acceptance and eventually trivial quibbling.