2012-11-26
Explanation
This comic is titled "Get to Know Your Cutlery-Related Intimacy Metaphors" and presents three panels exploring utensil-based terms for cuddling positions. The first panel shows "Spooning" -- a well-known term for a cuddling position where two people lie on their sides nestled together, like stacked spoons. The stick figures demonstrate this familiar position innocently.
The second panel shows "Forking," which is depicted with a "CENSORED" bar covering the stick figures. The joke here is obvious: "forking" sounds like a profanity, and the position shown is explicitly sexual rather than just cuddling, hence the censorship. The visual gag plays on the similarity between "fork" and a well-known expletive.
The third panel introduces "Sporking" -- a portmanteau of spooning and forking, just as a spork is a hybrid of a spoon and fork. In this panel, two stick figures are in a spooning position, but one says "I'''m trying to sleep!" while the other responds "Look, this thing has a mind of its own!" The joke is that sporking is the awkward middle ground: you'''re trying to innocently spoon, but the physical proximity leads to an involuntary "forking" situation, combining both activities whether you want to or not -- much like how a spork is an ungainly compromise between two utensils.
The votey panel shows "Uncensored" above what appears to be two stick-figure legs intertwined, which is the absurdly anticlimactic reveal of what was behind the censored bar in the forking panel -- just tangled legs, which is both a visual joke about fork tines interlocking and a deliberate subversion of expectations.