Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Tonight

2021-10-04 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
Tonight
Votey panel for Tonight
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

A bearded man asks a group of friends: "Hey everyone! Wanna sit around being frightened and disgusted for 40 minutes tonight?" They respond: "Sure!" "Yeah!" But one person adds: "Could we also be horny from time to time?"

Below, the caption reads: "The hardest thing to explain to aliens will be horror movies."

The comic takes a step back and describes the experience of watching horror movies from an outsider's perspective. When stripped of cultural context, the concept is absurd: humans voluntarily subject themselves to fear and disgust for entertainment. The added request to "also be horny from time to time" is a jab at the horror genre's well-known tendency to mix in sexual content (the classic "sex and death" pairing in slasher films). The joke is that horror movies would be genuinely baffling to an outside observer -- why would a species deliberately trigger its own fear responses for fun? The comic highlights how much of human entertainment relies on experiencing negative emotions in a safe context, something that might be unique to (or at least very strange about) human psychology.

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