Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

even

2024-07-16 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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even
Votey panel for even
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Explanation

This comic is a wordplay joke built around the phrase "r-strategist." In biology, r/K selection theory distinguishes between r-strategists (organisms that produce many offspring with little parental investment, like frogs or insects) and K-strategists (organisms that produce few offspring with heavy parental investment, like humans or elephants).

The comic shows a frog -- a classic r-strategist animal -- standing on a rock and emotionally reciting a long list of names: "How could you? Even little John? And Mary? And Maddie? Francesca? Pablo? Tyson? James? Sarah? Robert? Emily? William? ..." The list goes on and on, filling the entire panel with dozens of names. The caption at the bottom reads: "Infidelity among r-strategists is devastating."

The joke is that since r-strategists have enormous numbers of offspring, discovering a partner's infidelity means going through the heartbroken process of naming every single one of the hundreds of children who have been betrayed. Where a human might say "How could you do this to our children?" and name two or three kids, the frog has to name an absurdly long list. The humor comes from applying human emotional relationship drama (infidelity, betrayal) to an organism whose reproductive strategy is fundamentally incompatible with that kind of individual parental attachment.

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