shirts
Explanation
The Joke
A woman tells her partner that she worries they do not express their feelings clearly, so she has purchased special shirts that detect brain waves and display the wearer's internal emotional state. This is a classic setup for a relationship communication exercise gone wrong. In the final panel, the shirts reveal the truth: the man wearing the shirt feels "Ambivalence about the whole shirt thing," while the woman's partner displays "Anger tinged with respect." Neither reaction is the loving emotional openness she was presumably hoping for.
The punchline works because the shirts do exactly what they are supposed to do -- they reveal honest emotions -- but the honest emotions are hilariously mundane and slightly hostile rather than deep or romantic. The man is not hiding passionate feelings; he is genuinely just ambivalent about the shirts. And his partner is angry about being forced into this exercise but grudgingly respects the initiative.
The Humor
The comic lampoons the common relationship advice that couples need to "communicate more openly." The joke is that when perfect emotional transparency is actually achieved through technology, the results are deeply anticlimactic. Rather than uncovering hidden wells of love or buried resentment, the shirts reveal that people's internal states are often petty, mixed, and not particularly interesting. The huge bold "HOW DARE YOU!?" outburst in response to being given the shirts contrasts perfectly with the nuanced, almost bureaucratic emotional readouts. It suggests that sometimes the messy, imprecise way humans communicate feelings is actually preferable to clinical accuracy.