Potential Mates
Explanation
The Joke
A woman evaluates potential mates through an increasingly absurd evolutionary/biological lens. She starts by considering a normal man but finds him lacking. She then considers progressively stranger options: a man who demonstrates fitness through elaborate displays, then various animals and creatures that demonstrate different evolutionary strategies. Each potential mate is evaluated on criteria like genetic fitness, resource acquisition, parental investment, and sexual selection signals. The comic escalates through various mating strategies from the animal kingdom -- from birds doing courtship dances to mantises where the female eats the male -- applying them all with deadpan academic seriousness to human dating. The woman ultimately rejects every option, finding flaws in each mating strategy, and ends up alone, having over-analyzed the process to the point of paralysis.
The Humor
The humor lies in applying the cold, clinical framework of evolutionary biology and sexual selection theory to human romance. By treating dating as a species-level optimization problem, the comic satirizes both the reductive tendencies of evolutionary psychology and the modern tendency to overthink romantic choices. Each potential mate is evaluated not as a person but as a bundle of reproductive strategies, which is simultaneously scientifically valid and deeply absurd when applied to actual human relationships. The escalating absurdity of the candidates -- from normal humans to animals -- highlights how ridiculous it is to reduce mate selection to pure biological calculus. The comic also pokes fun at people who use evolutionary psychology to justify their dating preferences or failures.
References
The comic references several concepts from evolutionary biology and sexual selection theory, including Fisherian runaway selection, honest signaling, parental investment theory (Robert Trivers), and the handicap principle (Amotz Zahavi). The various animal mating strategies depicted are based on real behaviors observed in nature.