2014-11-02
Explanation
The Joke
An alien explains to humans that about 500,000 years ago, its species discovered humanity and found them too violent. So they modified human minds so that humans could not imagine themselves as truly happy -- their happiness would always be relative, measured against others rather than being absolute. The alien describes this as ensuring humans could never imagine themselves being happy in isolation and would always compare themselves to others.
Despite this devastating revelation that humanity's entire emotional architecture was deliberately crippled by aliens, the humans completely ignore it. Instead, they get into a petty argument about wedding cake flavors ("our wedding cake should be red velvet" / "I was hearing vanilla"), which perfectly demonstrates the alien's point. They are incapable of focusing on what matters and instead squabble over trivial relative preferences.
The alien then asks if ten million tons of space gold would buy their silence, and the humans eagerly accept -- again demonstrating that their happiness is entirely relative and transactional.
The final panel shows the caption "Emissary memo to the eleven million," implying the aliens have done this many times -- buying off humanity group by group -- and that humans are so predictably driven by relative gain that this always works.
The Humor
The comedy works on multiple levels. First, there is the absurdity of aliens revealing a civilization-altering secret about the fundamental nature of human happiness, only to have the humans immediately prove the alien right by bickering about cake flavors. The joke is self-demonstrating: the very flaw the alien describes is what prevents the humans from caring about the revelation.
Second, there is the satirical commentary on hedonic adaptation and social comparison -- real psychological phenomena where humans do, in fact, measure their well-being relative to others rather than in absolute terms. The comic takes this genuine observation about human nature and gives it a darkly funny origin story.
Third, the bribery gag at the end adds another layer: not only are the humans unable to appreciate absolute happiness, they are also trivially easy to buy off, further confirming the alien's low opinion of them.
References
The comic references the psychological concept of the hedonic treadmill (also called hedonic adaptation), which describes how humans tend to return to a baseline level of happiness regardless of positive or negative life events. It also references social comparison theory, originally proposed by Leon Festinger in 1954, which posits that people evaluate themselves by comparing to others rather than by absolute standards.