2012-09-08
Explanation
This comic features a red-haired man approaching a woman and asking "Hey, you wanna play rock-paper-scissors-penis?" The woman immediately responds "Go to hell." In the second panel, the man tries to walk it back: "What? Oh! Oh, I'''m sorry. You have the wrong idea. Penis loses to every other throw, so it never gets used. So, it'''s not creepy." In the final panel, the woman says "Sorry, I'''m gonna go anywhere else now," and the man calls after her: "Sorry, you don'''t understand GAME THEORY!"
The joke operates on multiple levels. First, there is the obvious social inappropriateness of proposing any game with that name to a stranger. Second, the man'''s defense is technically logical -- if one option in a competitive game always loses, a rational player would never choose it, making it functionally irrelevant to gameplay. But his attempt to use game theory to justify the game'''s name completely misses the point of why the woman is uncomfortable. The humor lies in the gap between mathematical rationality and social awareness: being technically correct about game theory does not make the situation any less creepy.
The votey panel shows a diagram of the game'''s mechanics with rock, paper, scissors, and the fourth option, with arrows showing that it loses to all three traditional options (marked "3=D"). This confirms the man'''s claim was mathematically accurate, which only makes the situation funnier -- he really did think through the game design, yet somehow failed to anticipate the obvious social reaction.