hungers
Explanation
This comic explores the idea that complex human emotions are just combinations of a few fundamental emotional states -- an analogy to how colors can be built from primary colors. The first speaker proposes that emotions like "sad" and "happy" are fundamental, and more complex states are just combinations. The second speaker agrees but asks about the fundamentals. The first speaker lists "hangry, hungry, and horny" as the three base emotions, implying that all human emotional life reduces to basic animal drives of hunger and lust. A Venn diagram shows these three overlapping, with higher-level emotions like "BDSM" labeled in the overlapping regions.
The humor comes from the bait-and-switch: the setup frames this as a legitimate psychological theory about emotional primitives, then the punchline deflates it by making the "fundamental emotions" absurdly reductive and carnal. The Venn diagram adds a visual punchline by mapping specific kinks and behaviors to overlapping regions of hunger and horniness.
A second layer of humor comes in the final panels, where a character objects by citing "whoever said simplicity is next to godliness is basically dead wrong" -- and another character wonders if "soap" (as in "soap opera") is a valid counterexample, further muddling the philosophical pretensions of the conversation. The comic satirizes both pop-psychology reductionism and the human tendency to mistake crude simplification for deep insight.