2014-12-27
Explanation
The Joke
A senator holds a press conference where he announces several shocking confessions: he cheated on his wife with a prostitute, he is secretly a crack dealer, and he once shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. He then reveals that none of those things are true. Instead, he says he will spend the next three hours giving a detailed presentation on preventable diseases in third world countries and what the doors have done. He looks forward to seeing their headlines tomorrow. The final panel shows the next day'''s newspaper with the headline: "Senator Lies About Having Sex With Prostitute."
The Humor
The comic satirizes media incentives and the nature of news coverage. The senator tries to manipulate the press by leading with sensational false confessions, then pivoting to genuinely important policy content (preventable diseases in developing nations). His gambit is that the press, having been hooked by the scandalous opening, will stick around for the substantive policy discussion. However, the media does exactly what you would expect: they ignore the three hours of policy content and instead run the most sensational angle possible -- that the senator lied about the sex scandal. The joke is that the senator cannot win. Even his clever attempt to game the media'''s appetite for scandal backfires, because "Senator Lies About Scandal" is itself a more compelling headline than any policy discussion.
References
The line "shot a man in Reno just to watch him die" is a reference to the Johnny Cash song "Folsom Prison Blues" (1955), in which the narrator sings this famous lyric.