Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The comic shows two characters looking at what appears to be a flipbook. The first character says something like: "Wow, this dancing moose really captured the notion of accumulated personal differences made unbearable due to emotional unavailability."

The caption below reads: "The worst day of my life was the time I got divorced via flipbook."

The joke operates by combining two things that don't belong together: the deeply painful experience of divorce and the absurdly primitive medium of a flipbook. A flipbook is a children's toy — a stack of pages with sequential drawings that create a simple animation when you flip through them quickly. It is perhaps the lowest-fidelity medium possible for communicating anything.

The humor comes from the idea that someone chose to communicate the end of their marriage through a flipbook animation of a dancing moose that somehow serves as a metaphor for their relationship's collapse. The first character's over-analytical interpretation of the dancing moose — reading deep emotional meaning into what is essentially a crude stick-figure animation — parodies the way people sometimes find profound meaning in art. But the real joke is the absurd cruelty of the delivery method: being divorced via flipbook is simultaneously too impersonal (it's a children's toy) and too personal (someone had to hand-draw each frame).

The comic also satirizes the modern tendency to deliver difficult personal news through increasingly impersonal media — from face-to-face conversations, to phone calls, to text messages, to (in this absurd extreme) flipbook animations.