oops
Explanation
The Joke
A skeleton is tied to a chair, clearly having been held captive long enough to decompose down to bare bones. The Flash (recognizable by his red suit and lightning bolt emblem) stands before the skeleton, frantically explaining that he "just ran out to get a sandwich" and was planning to summon the police to arrest the captive when he got back. He then realizes with horror what has happened: "Oh God what have I done?"
The caption at the bottom reads: "Once again, The Flash fails to account for relativity." The joke is a play on the word "relativity" -- in physics, Einstein's theory of special relativity describes how time passes differently depending on relative velocity. Because The Flash moves at near-light speed, what felt like a quick sandwich run to him actually took years (or decades) in normal time, long enough for his prisoner to die and decompose into a skeleton.
The Humor
The comic works on multiple levels. First, there is the absurd visual gag of a superhero returning to find only a skeleton where a living person used to be, combined with his oblivious shock. Second, the punchline hinges on a clever scientific wordplay: "relativity" is both a casual word meaning "relative perspective" and a reference to Einstein's special relativity, where time dilation at high speeds means The Flash's subjective experience of time would diverge wildly from that of a stationary person. It satirizes the common observation that superhero fiction rarely accounts for the actual physics that would accompany superpowers.
References
- Special Relativity: Einstein's 1905 theory predicts that as an object approaches the speed of light, time slows for that object relative to a stationary observer (time dilation). If The Flash truly moves at relativistic speeds, a brief errand from his perspective could span years for everyone else.
- The Flash: A DC Comics superhero whose power is super-speed, often depicted as moving at or near the speed of light.