Fruitcake
Explanation
The Joke
The comic opens with a character announcing they have figured out how to make a tasty fruitcake. What follows is a series of panels, each offering a "helpful" suggestion that systematically removes everything that makes a fruitcake a fruitcake.
The suggestions include: if you soak it in fortified wine, it gets much better; if you cut out the fruit, you can get more brandy in; if you make the cake lighter, it improves further; you can also cut down on the remaining fruits and nuts; and if you add some spice too, that helps. By the end, the character realizes that what they have described is not a fruitcake at all -- it is just "a glass filled with brandy" or perhaps something that "goes really well with a nice cup of coffee." The final product has been iteratively improved until it bears no resemblance to the original.
The Humor
The humor comes from the iterative optimization process that accidentally destroys the original concept. Each individual suggestion sounds reasonable -- adding brandy, reducing dense fruit, making the cake lighter -- but the cumulative effect is the complete elimination of every component that defines a fruitcake. This is a common comedic pattern where incremental "improvements" lead to an absurd conclusion.
The comic also plays on the well-known cultural joke that fruitcake is universally disliked. The premise that fruitcake needs to be "figured out" to be made tasty already concedes that fruitcake is inherently bad. The punchline -- that the only way to make fruitcake good is to remove the fruit, the cake, and everything else until you are just drinking brandy -- is both a satisfying logical conclusion and a sharp commentary on the treat's reputation. The joke suggests that the best fruitcake is one that contains nothing associated with fruitcake, which is another way of saying fruitcake is irredeemable.
References
- Fruitcake has a longstanding reputation in American culture as an undesirable holiday gift, spawning numerous jokes about its density, longevity, and general inedibility.
- Traditional fruitcake recipes do in fact call for soaking the cake in brandy or other spirits, which is a real technique for improving flavor and preservation.
- The iterative removal process parodies optimization problems where the "optimal" solution turns out to be a trivial or degenerate case -- a concept familiar in mathematics and engineering.