politics-2
Explanation
The Joke
The comic is titled "Modern Politics Is Weird." A man sits in front of his TV, which announces: "Scandal today as a candidate unhinged his jaw and slowly enveloped a screaming child." The man's thought bubble reads: "Boy, I wonder how that'll affect his poll numbers."
The joke is about political desensitization. The news is reporting something that should be absolutely disqualifying and horrifying -- a politician literally unhinging his jaw like a snake and consuming a child -- and yet the viewer's only reaction is to wonder about the political horse-race implications. He is not shocked, not outraged, not calling the police. He is just curious about the polling data.
The Humor
The comic satirizes how modern political media has trained audiences to process even the most monstrous behavior through the lens of electoral strategy rather than basic human morality. The absurdity of the specific scandal (a candidate eating a child like a python) is deliberately extreme to highlight just how far the desensitization has gone. No matter how grotesque the act, the 24-hour news cycle has conditioned viewers to immediately ask "but will it hurt him in the polls?" rather than "is this person a monster?" The hovertext ("Then, you have to hear a two week news cycle about the 'alleged pedophagic incident'") deepens the satire by suggesting that even literal child-eating would be qualified with "alleged" and subjected to the standard two-week scandal cycle before everyone moves on to the next outrage.
References
The comic was published in December 2017, during a period of intense political polarization in the United States. It satirizes the broader phenomenon of political tribalism where supporters evaluate scandals primarily in terms of electoral impact rather than moral content. The term "pedophagic" in the hovertext is a darkly comic neologism meaning "child-eating," constructed from Greek roots (paido- meaning child, and -phagic meaning eating).