lottery
Explanation
The Joke
A woman excitedly tells her friend Steve that she just won the lottery. Steve's immediate reaction is "I'm so sorry." When she protests that he should be happy for her, Steve launches into a bleak lecture grounded in hedonic adaptation research: "The best research tells us happiness is always relative to expectations." He explains that now that she has won the lottery, she cannot expect it to keep happening, and therefore she "will always be a slightly sadder person." Her only chance, he says, is to "immediately commit an atrocity" that will make the lottery win look minor by comparison. The woman responds "That's insanity," to which Steve replies "Precisely!" In the final panel, Steve apparently takes his own advice, calling in a threat: "Hello, Lufthansa? Bomb. Steve Kulver."
The comic satirizes the well-known psychological research on lottery winners and hedonic adaptation -- the finding that lottery winners do not end up significantly happier in the long run because their expectations and baseline for happiness shift upward.
The Humor
The joke works by taking a legitimate psychological finding (hedonic adaptation in lottery winners) and following it to its most absurd logical conclusion. Steve's reasoning starts from real science -- there is genuine research suggesting lottery winners often return to baseline happiness levels -- but then careens off a cliff when he proposes that the only solution is to commit a crime so terrible it resets your happiness baseline downward. The final panel, where Steve himself commits an atrocity (a bomb threat) while cheerfully demonstrating his own theory, is the darkly comic capstone. It is a classic SMBC move: start with real science, then follow the logic until it produces a conclusion so monstrous it exposes the gap between theoretical reasoning and human reality.
References
The comic references the famous 1978 study by Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman, "Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?", which found that lottery winners were not significantly happier than non-winners after a period of adjustment. This study is one of the foundational papers in hedonic adaptation research.