2006-08-13
Original: 2006-08-13 on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1:
A man with red hair in a green shirt, holding a sandwich, speaks cheerfully to a man with brown hair seen from behind in the foreground.
Red-haired man: "Now that it's May of 2016, we sure don't have to worry about three-fourths of the world's population dying of a lethal strain of flu at the same time!"
Caption (below panel): "This comic will be hilarious in about 20 years."
Votey:
A hand-drawn graph. The vertical axis is labeled "# deaths" and the horizontal axis is labeled "funniness." A red curve starts high on the left (high deaths, low funniness), dips down to a low point in the middle, then climbs steeply back up to the top on the right (high funniness corresponds again to high deaths).
A man with red hair in a green shirt, holding a sandwich, speaks cheerfully to a man with brown hair seen from behind in the foreground.
Red-haired man: "Now that it's May of 2016, we sure don't have to worry about three-fourths of the world's population dying of a lethal strain of flu at the same time!"
Caption (below panel): "This comic will be hilarious in about 20 years."
Votey:
A hand-drawn graph. The vertical axis is labeled "# deaths" and the horizontal axis is labeled "funniness." A red curve starts high on the left (high deaths, low funniness), dips down to a low point in the middle, then climbs steeply back up to the top on the right (high funniness corresponds again to high deaths).
Alt text
An SMBC comic. In a single panel, a red-haired man in a green shirt holds a sandwich and cheerfully tells a brown-haired man (shown from behind): "Now that it's May of 2016, we sure don't have to worry about three-fourths of the world's population dying of a lethal strain of flu at the same time!" A caption beneath the panel reads: "This comic will be hilarious in about 20 years." The joke is that a casually optimistic statement about avoiding a pandemic is darkly funny in hindsight. The votey (bonus image) is a hand-drawn graph with the vertical axis labeled "# deaths" and the horizontal axis labeled "funniness." A red U-shaped curve starts high on the left, dips to a low point in the middle, and rises steeply back to the top on the right, implying that funniness peaks again at the highest death counts.
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.