2013-05-15
Explanation
This comic depicts a police raid on a high school prom, where officers announce they've received reports of "an unintentional boner" and order all young men standing an awkward distance from their dance partners to freeze. They spot a suspect, who protests his innocence, and a chase ensues. The officers shout that they'll find the culprit hiding in all the classic cover-up scenarios -- sitting with a book over his lap on a train, lying face-down on a massage table, or staying in a swimming pool pretending he wants to keep swimming. The suspect insists "I'm a man, dammit! A man!" and reveals he tucks it into his underwear band, prompting the officer to say "You're a real piece of work, kid."
The comic takes the universal, deeply embarrassing teenage experience of getting an unwanted erection at a school dance and exaggerates it into a full-blown police procedural, complete with a manhunt and dramatic chase. The humor works on multiple levels: the absurdity of law enforcement treating a normal bodily function as a crime, the hilariously specific list of situations where men try to hide erections (all of which are instantly recognizable), and the suspect's defiant confession about the waistband tuck -- a "trick" so widely known among men that it functions almost as shared secret knowledge. It's a comic that finds comedy in the gap between how catastrophically embarrassing these moments feel in adolescence versus how trivial and universal they actually are.