before-3
Explanation
The Joke
Two people are in visible pain, with splinters in their lips, asking "Why do we do this every year?!" They are sitting in front of a small wooden house. The caption reads: "Before gingerbread."
The Humor
The comic imagines a world before gingerbread was invented, where people apparently still had the tradition of making small decorative houses at the holidays — but built them out of regular wood. The absurdity comes from the implication that the tradition of eating/biting decorative houses predates the use of edible materials, meaning people were chomping down on actual lumber and suffering splinters every year while inexplicably refusing to stop. The joke works because it inverts the logical order: normally we'd assume gingerbread houses were inspired by real architecture, but here the tradition of biting into a house came first, and gingerbread was the eventual merciful solution.
Broader Context
SMBC has a rich tradition of "before X was invented" comics that imagine absurd historical scenarios where some modern convenience hasn't arrived yet. These comics typically work by taking a current practice, removing one key element, and showing that people stubbornly continued the practice anyway in its most painful form. The format lets Weinersmith explore how much of human tradition is arbitrary habit versus genuine preference.