Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Government

2020-09-18 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
Government
Votey panel for Government
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

The Joke

A group of people are debating what the ideal form of government is. One person suggests it should be "the one that brings the most happiness." Another points out that this depends on a lot of things -- culture, history, technology, geography -- making it nearly impossible to determine which system is truly best. A third person then makes a logical leap: since we cannot know what brings the most happiness, we should logically just choose whichever form of government has the funniest name.

The final panel shows someone asking "What's it going to be?" and the answer is "A Dong" -- apparently the name of some governmental system selected purely for its comedic value.

The Humor

The comic satirizes political philosophy debates by exposing how they often reach an impasse: if the "best" government depends on countless variables that are impossible to fully account for, then the entire exercise of debating ideal government structures becomes somewhat futile. The joke takes this to its absurd conclusion -- if we truly cannot determine the best system by rational analysis, then we might as well pick the one with the funniest name. This is a classic SMBC move of taking a legitimate intellectual question, following it to an absurd but technically logical conclusion, and landing on something juvenile (a name that sounds like a body part).

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