norms-2
Explanation
This comic shows a well-dressed man smugly explaining to someone: "Oh no, I wasn't being rude. I'm just high status in our culture and thus exempted from a variety of behavioral norms."
The caption below reads: "Anthropologists should never be allowed to become famous."
The joke works by having someone use the clinical, detached language of anthropology to justify their own bad behavior. The man isn't denying he did something rude -- he's reframing it through the lens of social science, pointing out that high-status individuals in many cultures are indeed given more latitude to violate social norms. This is a well-documented phenomenon in anthropology and sociology: powerful people often face fewer consequences for rudeness, boundary violations, and other behaviors that would be unacceptable from lower-status individuals.
The humor comes from the collision between description and prescription. Anthropologists describe how societies work, including the uncomfortable truth that status creates behavioral double standards. But this man is using that descriptive observation as a prescriptive justification -- essentially saying "science confirms I'm allowed to be a jerk." The caption amplifies the joke by suggesting that if anthropologists become famous (and thus high-status), they would be uniquely dangerous because they would have both the social license to behave badly AND the academic framework to rationalize it. It's a joke about how understanding social dynamics doesn't make you immune to exploiting them -- it might actually make you better at it.