2010-10-15

A six-panel SMBC comic. A man and a green alien stand together at a bar, surveying women, with the alien giving absurdly clinical evaluations. The man asks "What about this human female?" and the alien says "Nah. Her weight is more than two standard deviations above average." Of the next woman the alien says her shirt implies she likes "syncopated improvisational rhythmic noise made by plucking strings" (jazz), whereas the alien prefers "regular phrase structures in rhythmic noise made by forcing air through a metal cone." Of a third, the alien notes "Her genetic lineage diverged from mine 7,000 years ago." Then the man spots a red-haired woman and says "Ooh! She looks nice." The alien asks "Why?" The man explains he had a red-haired babysitter whose left nipple he glimpsed through a keyhole for 14 seconds, then snaps "Don't judge me! What metric do you guys use?" The alien answers plainly: "Longterm personality compatibility." The man bursts out laughing: "AHAHAHAHAHAHA!" In the votey aftercomic, the alien's face peeks up into the bottom of the panel and it admits: "Also boobs." The joke flips the expected roles: the alien turns out to have the wholesome criterion while the human is the creepy one, and the votey undercuts the alien's wholesomeness.