about-to-diet
Explanation
The Joke
A woman announces she is going on a diet starting tomorrow, so today is her last day to eat what she wants. She then performs a series of increasingly absurd calculations: she figures she is trimming 500 calories from her daily food budget, and since she intends to diet for the rest of her life, she calculates the total calories she will save. Factoring in her improved diet extending her lifespan through medical advances, she arrives at a figure of approximately 8 million calories saved over her lifetime. She concludes that if she does not eat 8,000 cheeseburgers tonight, she is being cheated.
The next panel shows her buried under a mountain of food. In the final panel, the following day, she says she will start the diet next week, having made herself sick from the binge. The joke captures the classic pre-diet mentality of "last meal" bingeing taken to a mathematically absurd extreme.
The Humor
The comedy lies in the character using seemingly rigorous mathematical reasoning to justify spectacularly self-defeating behavior. Each step of her logic sounds plausible in isolation -- she will save calories over a lifetime, so she has "earned" those calories in advance -- but the conclusion is obviously absurd. It satirizes how people use rationalization to justify indulgence, especially the well-known psychological trap of the pre-diet binge, where the promise of future discipline becomes license for present excess. The visual of her buried under food, followed by the inevitable postponement of the diet, perfectly captures the cycle of failed diet resolutions.