the-perils-of-population
Explanation
The Joke
The comic presents two graphs. The first graph shows population growing over time, with a pie chart overlay breaking the population into two segments: a large portion labeled "Basically okay people" and a small slice labeled something like "The kind of people who will buy something, shove it in an orifice, then blame the seller when it gets stuck." The second graph shows "Absolute quantity of these kinds of assholes" increasing over time as a function of population growth.
In the final panel, someone asks why every medicine has a giant warning label, and another character answers simply: "Demography." The point is that even if the percentage of people who misuse products stays constant, the absolute number of such people grows with population, meaning more warning labels and more product liability concerns.
The Humor
The comic makes a wry observation about why consumer products come plastered with absurd warning labels ("do not insert into ear canal," "do not eat," etc.). It is not that humanity is getting dumber -- the proportion of people who do bizarre things with products remains roughly constant -- but as the total population grows, the absolute number of people doing those things increases. More people means more incidents, more lawsuits, and therefore more warning labels. The joke frames this mundane observation in the language of demography and statistics, giving a deadpan academic explanation for an everyday annoyance.
References
Demography is the statistical study of human populations, including their size, structure, and distribution. The comic plays on the mathematical relationship between percentages and absolute numbers -- a small fixed percentage of a growing population still produces a growing absolute number of edge cases.