2014-03-06
Explanation
The Joke
The comic is titled "We should never have let our kids read Atlas Shrugged." A mother tells her daughter Sally to clean her room. Sally defiantly responds: "Who is John Galt?"
The Humor
"Who is John Galt?" is the famous opening line and recurring refrain of Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged. In the novel, the phrase is used as a rhetorical expression of despair and resignation about the state of society, and John Galt himself is the hero who leads the world's productive individuals in a strike against collectivism. The joke is that Sally has absorbed Rand's philosophy of radical individualism and objectivism and is now applying it to resist her parents' authority. By responding "Who is John Galt?" to a simple request to clean her room, Sally is essentially staging her own miniature Randian revolt -- refusing to contribute her labor to the household "collective" (her family). The comic satirizes how Rand's philosophy, which appeals to many young readers, can be comically misapplied to mundane situations. It also plays on the common parental experience of children using whatever intellectual framework they have recently discovered to justify not doing chores.
References
- Atlas Shrugged (1957) is a novel by Ayn Rand that presents her philosophy of Objectivism through the story of productive industrialists who go on strike against a society that exploits them.
- John Galt is the central character of Atlas Shrugged who organizes the strike of the "men of the mind." The phrase "Who is John Galt?" recurs throughout the novel as a colloquial expression of helplessness.
- Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was a Russian-American novelist and philosopher who developed the philosophical system of Objectivism, which emphasizes rational self-interest, individual rights, and laissez-faire capitalism.