sexy
Explanation
The Joke
Someone poses the question: "People say a nice car is sexy, or a big bank account, or an expensive watch. No, no. You know what really makes a man sexy?" The expected answer would be something romantic or sentimental. Instead, someone responds with a deadpan evolutionary biology answer: "Killing a large mammal and bringing all the meat, then gaining status by giving surplus meat to members of our group is good."
The person who asked the question then complains: "You've gotten hard to talk to since you became an evolutionary biologist." The final panel has a caption: "Meat is power."
The Humor
The joke works by setting up a classic conversational trope -- the "what's really sexy" question -- and then subverting it with a hyper-literal evolutionary biology answer. Instead of giving a charming or witty response, the evolutionary biologist strips the concept of attractiveness down to its most primal, caveman-level explanation: the ability to hunt large prey and share resources with the group. The humor lies in the social awkwardness of someone who cannot turn off their academic lens, taking an everyday social question and answering it as if writing a journal article. The punchline "Meat is power" is a parody of aphoristic wisdom, reducing complex social dynamics to a blunt, absurdly simple evolutionary principle. The comic pokes fun at the tendency of evolutionary psychologists to reduce all human behavior to adaptive strategies.