2015-02-16
Explanation
The Joke
A multi-panel comic tracing the fictional etymology of a curse word. A man on the street says a word (bleeped out), and passersby react with shock. One person asks where the word came from, and someone traces it to a 14th-century manuscript. The trail leads to Petrarch, then to Francis Petrarch apparently hearing it from an army general in the wastes of Namibia. Then we learn the general got it from the "gods of all wicked words," but it turns out those gods actually got it from another source. The chain of attribution keeps going deeper and deeper, never reaching the actual origin, until the man at the beginning admits he just made the word up, and a bystander tells him it is a really good word.
The Humor
The comic satirizes the way people treat etymology and the origins of offensive language as if they have deep, ancient, and meaningful roots. Each new panel escalates the supposed origin to an increasingly grandiose and absurd historical source -- from medieval manuscripts to Renaissance scholars to mystical gods -- only for the entire elaborate chain to collapse when the original speaker casually admits he just made it up. The humor lies in the contrast between the epic journey of discovery and the mundane truth, mocking how people assign weight and gravity to language origins when words are ultimately arbitrary human inventions. The comic also pokes fun at the academic pursuit of tracing word origins to their ultimate source, suggesting the quest is inherently absurd.