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Explanation
The Joke
The comic depicts the Grinch from Dr. Seuss's "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" standing on a mountaintop, reciting his famous epiphany: "Maybe Christmas doesn't come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps... means a little bit more!" The caption below reads: "Shortly before the collapse of the Whoville department store industry."
The comic takes the heartwarming moral of the Grinch story -- that Christmas is about community and love rather than material goods -- and follows it to its logical economic conclusion. If the Whos in Whoville truly internalize the Grinch's message and stop buying Christmas presents from stores, then the retail sector of Whoville's economy would collapse. The department stores that presumably depend on holiday shopping for a huge portion of their annual revenue would go bankrupt.
The Humor
The humor lies in applying cold economic reasoning to a beloved children's story. The Grinch's transformation from villain to hero is one of the most iconic redemption arcs in American culture, but the comic points out that his anti-consumerist message, if taken seriously, would be economically devastating. This is a classic SMBC move: taking a feel-good cultural narrative and exposing the uncomfortable real-world implications that nobody thinks about. It also plays on the real-world tension between the "true meaning of Christmas" rhetoric and the fact that modern economies genuinely depend on holiday consumer spending -- retail businesses often make the majority of their annual profits in Q4.
References
- "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" is a 1957 children's book by Dr. Seuss, famously adapted into a 1966 TV special. The Grinch's realization that Christmas "doesn't come from a store" is the climactic moral of the story.