2013-07-07
Explanation
In this comic, a man encounters a genie and is granted three wishes. For his first wish, he asks for ten trillion tons of gold. The genie grants it but notes that the price of gold has inversely adjusted to the enormous supply -- the man now possesses a mountain of worthless yellow metal. For his second wish, the man asks for the gold to be priced at its current market rate. The genie obliges, but explains that while gold now scales with its expensive price, all other commodities have also become enormously expensive in response, with air alone costing one hundred trillion dollars per breath.
The man then wishes he could afford to breathe, and the genie grants this too -- but announces that everyone else will be dead within two minutes. The comic cuts to the man reading this story to a child at bedtime, who asks if there is a moral. The man replies, "Morality is an unnecessary hypothesis," while holding a book titled "Stories Without Morals."
The joke plays on the classic "genie wish" trope where every wish has an unintended catastrophic consequence. It satirizes basic economic principles -- flooding the market with gold would crash its price, and artificially fixing prices would create runaway inflation. The punchline about morality being an unnecessary hypothesis is a nod to Laplace'''s famous reply to Napoleon about God ("I had no need of that hypothesis"), reframed here as a darkly nihilistic bedtime lesson.
The votey panel shows someone asking the cartoonist why he does so many genie comics, to which the author replies, "I made a dumb wish years ago." This is a self-referential meta-joke about SMBC'''s frequent use of genie-based premises.