Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

Two women are discussing a man that one of them (Sally) is interested in. Her friend warns her not to go for him, saying "the guy is a human peacock." She elaborates sensibly: sure, there is a big flashy tail and you cannot help but look, but is he going to be kind? Is he stable? Is he smart? Is he fun? You cannot tell any of that from his display.

Sally concedes that her friend is right, but trails off dreamily: "But God... he is just so..." The final panel reveals the man literally has a giant peacock tail fanned out behind him, and Sally finishes: "Beautiful." Her friend desperately shouts "Look away!" as if the man's peacock display has a hypnotic, irresistible pull.

The Humor

The joke operates on the classic SMBC technique of taking a metaphor literally. "Human peacock" is a common expression for a vain, showy man who attracts attention through superficial displays (flashy clothes, expensive cars, etc.). The friend's advice is perfectly reasonable dating wisdom about looking past surface-level attractiveness. But the comic literalizes the metaphor by giving the man an actual peacock tail, which makes the friend's warning take on a hilariously different dimension -- she is not warning against shallow attraction but against the genuinely mesmerizing effect of iridescent plumage.

The humor also plays on the evolutionary biology of peacocks, where the female peahen is essentially powerless against the display of the male's tail despite it serving no practical purpose. By mapping this onto human dating, the comic suggests that some people are similarly helpless against flashy but substance-free displays of attractiveness.

References

The comic references the peacock's tail, a classic example in evolutionary biology often discussed in the context of sexual selection theory, first proposed by Charles Darwin. The peacock's elaborate tail is a textbook example of a "costly signal" or Zahavian handicap -- a trait that is biologically expensive to maintain but signals genetic fitness to potential mates.