dongworld
Explanation
This comic imagines a scenario where Freud's psychoanalytic theories — particularly his emphasis on sexual symbolism — turned out to be literally correct, and explores what that world would look like.
In the first panel, a character explains that "Freud had all these freakish human sex theories that just weren't true, but they were intellectually stimulating, so psychoanalysts started adding Freudian elements to their models."
The second panel draws an analogy: "Like if a literary scholar in the year 3000 looks at the early 21st century, where a bunch of the most popular books have characters with magic wands, and concludes that firing a gun is something about penises."
A third panel continues the thought experiment: "I bet if you read most historical poetry that talked about a pen and said it was about dongs, you would almost certainly be wrong. But if the whole world was actually built around dong-symbolism, then the pen is just a dong, and I think this is basically the world Freud saw."
In the final dark panel, two silhouetted figures share a moment: "For a brief moment, our world was alive with meaning." The other responds: "Oh, for the dong of it."
The comic offers a surprisingly thoughtful take on Freud. Rather than simply mocking Freudian theory (as many comics do), it suggests that Freud's world — where everything was laden with hidden sexual meaning — was in its own way a richer, more meaningful universe. The punchline "for the dong of it" (playing on "for the fun of it") brings it back to comedy, but there's a genuine wistfulness in the penultimate panel about living in a world where everything is symbolically connected, even if the connections are absurd.