2013-11-09
Explanation
The Joke
A police officer and a woman are looking at what appears to be a strip club stage. On the stage, instead of a performer, there is an enormous pile of paper money reaching to the ceiling. The officer announces: "Dead. Suffocation." The caption below reads: "Nobody dislikes currency inflation more than strippers."
The Humor
The joke connects two ideas: currency inflation (where money loses its value, meaning you need vastly more bills to represent the same purchasing power) and the tradition of patrons throwing or placing cash on stage at strip clubs. If severe inflation occurred, patrons would need to bring exponentially more paper bills to tip the same real value. Taken to its logical extreme, the sheer volume of near-worthless bills thrown on stage would become physically dangerous -- in this case, fatal. The stripper has been buried and suffocated under a mountain of now nearly worthless currency. It is a darkly absurd way to illustrate the practical consequences of hyperinflation through an unexpected lens.
References
Hyperinflation -- where currency rapidly loses value -- has occurred historically in places like Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela, where people needed wheelbarrows of cash for basic purchases. The comic applies this same principle to the specific context of a strip club.