2013-05-05
Explanation
The comic is titled "How to Make a Russian Literature Professor Cry in 3 Seconds" and shows a student looking at a syllabus and remarking, "Huh. I don't see any Ayn Rand on the syllabus." The professor is shown looking pained and on the verge of tears.
The humor works because Ayn Rand, while born in Russia (as Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum), is decidedly not the kind of Russian author that a Russian literature professor would teach. Russian literature courses typically focus on towering figures like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pushkin, and Gogol -- writers celebrated for their psychological depth, moral complexity, and literary artistry. Ayn Rand, by contrast, is known primarily for her novels promoting Objectivist philosophy (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged), which are generally not regarded as serious literary works by academic literature scholars. The suggestion that she belongs alongside the great Russian novelists would be deeply offensive to any professor who has dedicated their career to the rich tradition of Russian literature. The joke captures the particular pain of an expert encountering confident ignorance in their own field.