2014-03-16
Explanation
The Joke
A news broadcast announces that "the frog-herpes" is now officially a pandemic. It is lethal in 10% of cases and spreading quickly. How it made the leap from amphibians to humans is still a mystery. The comic then cuts to "Earlier..." where a woman tells a frog, "If you miss me, I will turn into a princess" -- a reversal of the classic fairy tale where kissing a frog turns it into a prince. The implication is that the woman kissed or had intimate contact with a frog, which is how the cross-species disease transmission occurred.
The Humor
The comic uses a classic SMBC structure: a serious or alarming premise (a bizarre pandemic) followed by a flashback that provides a ridiculous origin story. The humor comes from inverting the fairy tale of the Frog Prince. Instead of a princess kissing a frog to turn it into a prince, here a woman apparently kissed a frog hoping to turn herself into a princess -- getting the fairy tale backwards. This absurd misunderstanding of how the fairy tale works is presented as the origin of a deadly pandemic. The joke also plays on the real-world concern about zoonotic diseases (diseases that jump from animals to humans), suggesting that fairy-tale-based interspecies contact is the epidemiological missing link.
References
- The Frog Prince is a fairy tale most famously recorded by the Brothers Grimm, in which a frog transforms into a prince after being kissed by (or in earlier versions, thrown against a wall by) a princess.
- The comic references concerns about zoonotic disease transmission, which has been a recurring topic in public health discussions.