2013-12-24
Explanation
The Joke
A man asks his friend how his love life is going. The friend says "Oh, good" and then launches into a description of his girlfriend that sounds exactly like an H.P. Lovecraft horror description -- a girl whose face is difficult to look at, with limbs arranged in non-Euclidean geometry, who records underground sounds and speaks in an expansive scale. The first man is disturbed and suggests he should maybe break up with her. The friend defends her: "All come on, I bet she is not like any other girl." The bottom panel reveals: "Literary fun fact: His whole life, Lovecraft thought he was writing romantic comedies."
The Humor
The comic takes the distinctive purple prose of H.P. Lovecraft -- known for describing cosmic horrors with phrases like "non-Euclidean geometry," "indescribable" features, and unspeakable otherworldly entities -- and reframes it as a man lovingly describing his girlfriend. The joke hinges on the idea that Lovecraft's famously terrifying descriptions could, with a slight shift in context, read as the words of a smitten boyfriend who thinks his eldritch-horror girlfriend is just uniquely charming. The fictional "literary fun fact" at the bottom completes the joke by suggesting Lovecraft himself never realized his writing was horrifying -- he genuinely thought he was writing romantic comedies the whole time.
References
H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an American writer of weird fiction and cosmic horror. His works, including "The Call of Cthulhu" and "At the Mountains of Madness," are famous for their descriptions of incomprehensible, terrifying entities. "Non-Euclidean geometry" is a recurring motif in Lovecraft's work, used to describe alien architecture and forms that defy human spatial understanding.