2014-06-11
Explanation
The Joke
The comic is a simple graph with two axes. The Y-axis is labeled "Patheticness of Existence" and the X-axis is labeled "Size of Screen on Which You Are Currently Viewing Porno." The curve is U-shaped: patheticness is very high for very small screens (like a phone), drops to a minimum for medium-sized screens, and then shoots back up to very high for very large screens.
The Humor
The joke captures an intuitive but rarely articulated social observation. Watching pornography on a tiny phone screen suggests furtiveness and desperation -- you are doing it somewhere you should not be, hunched over a small device. A normal computer monitor is the "acceptable" middle ground where patheticness is minimized. But as the screen gets enormous -- a large TV, a projector, a home theater setup -- the patheticness returns with a vengeance, because the sheer effort and investment in creating an immersive pornography-viewing experience implies a level of commitment that circles back around to being deeply sad. The U-shaped curve is a common format in SMBC for expressing nonlinear relationships, and here it is used to map a social judgment that most people instinctively understand but would never graph.