2013-01-01
Explanation
This comic is labeled "Big Idea #23571926: Macabre Bumper Stickers." It shows the back of a car with a bumper sticker that reads: "My honor student metamorphosed into this bumper, and no science has yet been able to return him to us."
The joke is a dark twist on the ubiquitous "My child is an honor student at..." bumper stickers that parents proudly display on their cars. Instead of the typical boast about academic achievement, the sticker describes a Kafka-esque horror scenario in which the honor student has literally transformed into the car bumper itself, and no scientific intervention has been able to reverse the transformation. The word "metamorphosed" directly evokes Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning transformed into a giant insect. The humor is characteristically SMBC -- taking a mundane cultural artifact (the proud-parent bumper sticker) and pushing it to an absurd and darkly comic extreme. The matter-of-fact tone of the sticker, as if this were a normal thing to announce to fellow drivers, adds to the comedy. The "Big Idea" numbering in the title suggests this is one of an impossibly long series of strange ideas, a recurring SMBC format.