emotion-2
Explanation
The Joke
A professor presents a simple equation for emotional reactions: E = e / d, where E is your emotional reaction, e is the "emotional power" of an event, d is your distance from the event, and so the strength of your emotional reaction is the emotional power divided by your distance from it. This is a parody of how real physical laws work (particularly the inverse-square law for gravity or electromagnetic radiation), applied to human psychology.
A student then provides a counterexample: "Well, there was that earthquake that killed a thousand people, and I didn't care, but then my cursor disappeared and I lost my mind." The professor, stumped, mutters something about needing to add "cursed food" to the equation -- implying a correction factor for irrationally intense emotional reactions to trivial personal inconveniences.
The Humor
The comic satirizes our well-documented inability to scale our emotional responses proportionally to the actual severity of events. A massive earthquake killing thousands elicits a shrug, while a minor computer glitch produces genuine rage. The joke works because it is painfully relatable -- most people have experienced getting more upset about a lost cursor or a slow internet connection than about genuinely catastrophic world events. By framing this as a failure of a neat mathematical model, Weinersmith highlights the absurdity of human emotional calibration. The professor's attempt to patch the equation rather than abandon it is a further joke about how academics respond to contradictory data -- they do not discard the theory, they just add more variables.
References
- The equation parodies inverse-distance or inverse-square laws common in physics, such as Newton's law of gravitation (F = Gm1m2/r^2) or Coulomb's law for electrostatic force.