Nature
Explanation
The Joke
The comic opens with a character marveling at the wonders of nature, observing how many life forms live on a single old tree and how they all work together to form an ecosystem. They declare, "We have so much to learn from nature. Things like..." and the comic then cuts to a series of panels showing what nature actually teaches: a dead animal being eaten by insects ("Eating corpses"), a praying mantis biting the head off its mate ("Destroying your sex partners"), a caterpillar consuming a leaf ("Devouring so much food the neighbors can't grow"), and parasitic insects ("Treating other organisms like hotels, their still-living bodies as incubators for your offspring").
The final panels show two characters discussing this. One says, "I meant the tiny percent of nature that isn't horrifying," and the other responds, "Cruel or uninspired?"
The Humor
The joke targets the common romantic tendency to invoke "nature" as a source of moral or philosophical wisdom, as in phrases like "we should learn from nature" or "nature knows best." The comic points out that if you actually look at what goes on in the natural world, most of it involves brutal predation, parasitism, and survival strategies that would be considered horrifying by human ethical standards. The final punchline twists the knife further: even the small portion of nature that isn't horrifying is either cruel or uninspired, leaving no part of the natural world that actually serves as a good moral example. It is a classic SMBC move of taking a feel-good platitude and demolishing it with literal-minded analysis.