a-bad-ad-hoc-theory
Explanation
The Joke
A nature-documentary-style comic presents "scientists" offering increasingly absurd ad hoc explanations for squirrel behavior. It starts with a seemingly reasonable claim -- squirrels bury acorns to store food -- but then a "contrarian hypothesis" suggests squirrels are actually farming oak trees. Each subsequent panel adds more elaborate, unfalsifiable amendments to the theory: the squirrels supposedly built a volcano, engaged in ritualistic sacrifice, formed political parties, wrote a constitution, and ultimately the theory becomes so convoluted that the "results" are indistinguishable from squirrels just running around being squirrels.
The Humor
The comic is a satire of bad scientific theorizing, specifically the practice of constructing ad hoc hypotheses -- explanations that are continuously patched and amended to accommodate contradictory evidence rather than being abandoned. The title "A Bad Ad Hoc Theory" announces this directly.
The humor escalates as each revision of the "theory" becomes more anthropomorphic and absurd, attributing human-like civilization, politics, and culture to squirrels, while the actual observable behavior remains identical to what you'd expect from ordinary squirrels. This parodies how some theories in the social sciences, evolutionary psychology, or fringe academia can become so over-fitted to their data that they explain everything and therefore nothing.
The comic also pokes fun at contrarianism in academia -- the impulse to propose a counterintuitive theory purely for the sake of novelty, then defending it past the point of reason.
References
The concept of ad hoc hypotheses is central to the philosophy of science. Karl Popper argued that unfalsifiable theories -- those that can accommodate any evidence through ad hoc modifications -- are not truly scientific. This comic illustrates Popper's critique in an accessible and humorous way.