2013-03-09
Explanation
This comic is titled "Has your city banned large containers of sugary drinks? Here are a few hack suggestions" -- a reference to New York City's 2012-2013 attempt to ban the sale of sugary drinks in containers larger than 16 ounces, a controversial public health measure championed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The comic offers three increasingly absurd workarounds. Hack 1, "Separate the Ingredients," suggests selling carbonated water and a frozen syrup cube separately. Hack 2, "Separate the Conditions," provides a tiny one-ounce bottle along with an industrial-strength bottle inflator and a soda fountain. Hack 3, "Klein Bottle," proposes replacing banned 64-ounce containers with "extra large two-dimensional non-orientable surfaces."
The humor escalates from somewhat plausible loophole-exploitation to mathematical absurdity. The first hack is a reasonable (if silly) way to technically comply with a ban on large sugary drink containers -- the components aren't a sugary drink until combined. The second hack uses the letter of the law against its spirit by starting with a legal tiny container and providing the means to inflate it. The third hack is the mathematical punchline: a Klein bottle is a famous object in topology that is a non-orientable surface with no distinguishable "inside" or "outside." Since it has no interior volume in three-dimensional space (it can only truly exist in four dimensions), it technically can't contain any ounces of anything, making it an absurd but mathematically valid way to circumvent a container size limit. The customer's enthusiastic "I'll take four" makes the ending even funnier.