2014-05-31
Explanation
The Joke
This is a long-form comic about a focus group being used to create a newspaper comic strip. A media executive gathers a diverse panel to help design a comic that will appeal to the broadest possible audience. Through a series of focus group sessions, every creative decision is driven by demographic data and market research rather than artistic vision.
The process proceeds through several stages: first, they discover that women are disproportionately attracted to men with bigger noses ("the bigger the nose, the better"), leading to an absurdly large-nosed protagonist. They pick topics from Nature magazine headlines. They consult evolutionary psychology to determine what jokes people want. They discover that comics about loss are always popular. They keep adjusting based on contradictory feedback -- adding a diverse cast for universities, making characters sexy for advertisers -- until the result is an incoherent mess.
The final panel reveals the end product: a thoroughly focus-grouped, committee-designed comic strip that has been "improved" into meaningless chaos, as the creators declare "we have come to liberate white males" -- a nonsensical tagline born from trying to please everyone.
The Humor
The comic is a satire of the creative process when it is driven entirely by market research, focus groups, and demographic pandering rather than genuine artistic expression. Each panel escalates the absurdity as more stakeholders and data points are incorporated, resulting in a product that satisfies no one because it tries to satisfy everyone.
It lampoons several real phenomena: the use of focus groups in media development, the over-reliance on evolutionary psychology to explain consumer preferences, the pressure to be demographically inclusive for cynical business reasons rather than genuine representation, and the way corporate media reduces creative work to a series of calculated market decisions. The fact that the end result is completely incomprehensible despite (or because of) all the optimization is the core joke -- art by committee produces anti-art.
The comic also functions as meta-commentary, since SMBC itself is an independently created webcomic that succeeds precisely because it does not go through this kind of corporate process.