2012-12-16
Explanation
This comic features a young boy confiding his romantic dilemmas to his imaginary friend -- an apatosaurus dinosaur. The boy shares typical childhood relationship worries: whether Sally likes him or just liked his cake, whether he should marry Sally or Natalie (who smells like peanut butter), and whether his love of peanut butter will last. Meanwhile, the apatosaurus shares its own perspective: everyone it ever loved is dead, and any descendants it might have left were killed in the aftermath of a gigantic asteroid impact. The boy blithely ignores this existential devastation and decides he'll "go with Sally because she's prettier," leaving the dinosaur to mutter "I have nothing."
The joke works on the contrast between the boy's trivial childhood romantic anxieties and the dinosaur's genuinely tragic cosmic backstory. The apatosaurus is dealing with species-wide extinction-level grief, but the boy treats it as just another voice in his romantic deliberation -- and then ignores it entirely. The comic plays on the trope of imaginary friends by making this one a creature from 65 million years ago whose problems are hilariously incommensurable with a child's worries about which girl to "marry." The punchline, "I have nothing," captures the dinosaur's total defeat -- it cannot compete with the self-absorption of childhood.