cupid39s-arrow
Explanation
The Joke
Cupid draws his bow to shoot a man walking down the street, hoping to make him fall in love. But the arrow misses and instead hits the man's laptop (or phone). Cupid panics — "Wait! Wait! Shit!" — realizing the arrow struck the wrong target.
In the next panel, the man is now sitting at his computer with a heart symbol above him, deeply in love... with whatever he found on the internet. In the final panel, set "later," someone asks Cupid: "Hey Cupid, have you noticed that constant connectivity has risen in tandem with the number of weird fetishes?" Cupid sheepishly responds "I have not."
The Humor
The comic provides a mythological origin story for the rise of internet fetishes. The premise is that Cupid's arrows, which are supposed to make people fall in love with other people, have been accidentally hitting electronic devices instead — causing people to fall in love with whatever they happen to be looking at online. This neatly "explains" why the internet age has seen an explosion of increasingly niche and unusual romantic and sexual fixations.
The humor works because it takes the innocent, cherubic image of Cupid and makes him inadvertently responsible for one of the more awkward aspects of modern internet culture. Cupid's defensive denial in the last panel — pretending not to have noticed the correlation — makes it even funnier, suggesting he is fully aware of the chaos he has caused but would rather not take responsibility.