Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

prizes

2016-08-04 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
prizes
Votey panel for prizes
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

The Joke

A couple is at what appears to be a carnival or arcade. The man explains that they had "pretty good" sex, during which he won ten tickets. Tickets can be redeemed at the ticket counter for prizes like pencils, erasers, bouncy balls, and plastic figurines. With enough tickets, you can get a "plush armadillo."

The woman then reveals the absurdity of the situation: she does not particularly enjoy the sex, she does not like stuffed animals, and yet she is going to keep having sex "over and over" in an effort to win the top prize. She then adds, "I hope you don't find this off-putting." The man responds: "Honestly I just wish I'd thought of it first."

The Humor

The comic takes the familiar skee-ball/arcade prize redemption model -- where people obsessively play mediocre games not for the fun of the game itself but to accumulate enough tickets for a prize they do not really want -- and transplants it onto sex. The joke is that the woman has reduced sex to a repetitive, joyless grind purely for the sake of earning a cheap reward, mirroring how arcade games exploit the psychology of sunk costs and incremental rewards. The final panel adds an extra layer: instead of being disturbed by his partner treating sex as a ticket-farming exercise, the man is jealous he did not think of the scheme first, suggesting both partners are equally susceptible to this kind of irrational reward-chasing behavior.

View History (1) Original Comic
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