shoes
Explanation
The Joke
A robber demands "Gimme all your money and also your shoes!" The victim asks "Why the shoes?" The robber explains: "The shoes are an increase in mugging returns because they're high enough to offset the cost of laundry due to running." The victim responds "Oh yeah, gasoline is $7 again this week" and the other character says "Better gimme the socks."
The Humor
The comic starts as a standard mugging scenario but the robber justifies his demand for shoes using economic reasoning — the shoes have value because their resale offsets the operational costs of being a mugger (specifically, the laundry costs from all the running involved in chasing victims). When the victim mentions high gas prices, the mugger escalates his demands to include socks, implying that worsening economic conditions justify increasingly petty theft.
The humor lies in treating street crime as a rational economic enterprise with cost-benefit analysis. The mugger isn't threatening or menacing — he's essentially explaining his business model. And the victim responds not with fear but with sympathy, as if they're two people commiserating about the economy.
Broader Context
SMBC frequently applies economic and game-theoretic thinking to absurd situations. This comic fits into a tradition of jokes where criminals behave like rational economic actors, which is both a satire of economics (for assuming all behavior is rational) and of crime (for being treated as just another profession with overhead costs). The reference to high gas prices grounds the absurdity in real-world economic anxieties.