markets
Explanation
The Joke
A character pitches an app idea: a "Financial Headline Generator." The app works by describing stock market movement using a random term for "up" or "down," and then choosing a current news item as the reason for the movement. The comic then shows three example outputs: "Stock market TANKS as SERIAL KILLER FINALLY BROUGHT TO JUSTICE," "Stock market PLUMMETS as MILLENNIALS ENJOY CREATIVE WRITING," and "Stock market SOARS as MAN IN FLORIDA SETS ANUS AFLAME."
The joke is that these generated headlines are absurd -- the news items have absolutely no logical connection to stock market performance. Yet they feel eerily similar to real financial journalism, where reporters routinely attribute market movements to essentially random or unrelated news events after the fact.
The Humor
The humor works because it satirizes a very real phenomenon in financial media. Every day, financial journalists write headlines explaining why the market went up or down, attributing causation to whatever happened to be in the news that day. In reality, stock market movements are driven by enormously complex factors, and the neat causal narratives presented in headlines are largely post-hoc rationalizations. By making the "reasons" completely absurd -- a Florida man incident, millennials enjoying creative writing -- Weinersmith highlights how arbitrary these attributions already are in real life. The randomized app would arguably produce headlines just as accurate as the real ones.