2014-12-01
Original: 2014-12-01 on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1
Three people sit around a table in a meeting, as if in a corporate boardroom or office.
Man in suit: PEOPLE JUST AREN'T BUYING CHEAP VODKA ANY MORE.
Woman with red hair and round glasses: WE NEED TO GO UPSCALE WITHOUT SPENDING ANY MORE ON PRODUCTION. MARKETING, WHATCHA GOT?
(A third person, seen from behind, faces them across the table.)
Panel 2
A liquor bottle with a brown cap. Its label reads:
O'Finnegan's
PURE
Zero Malt
SCOTCH
Votey:
A hand-drawn graph. At the top: "Quality = 1 / malts". The vertical axis is labeled "Quality of Scotch" and the horizontal axis is labeled "malts", with tick marks numbered 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 ... up to the infinity symbol. The plotted curve starts extremely high near zero malts and drops off steeply, approaching zero as malts increase.
Three people sit around a table in a meeting, as if in a corporate boardroom or office.
Man in suit: PEOPLE JUST AREN'T BUYING CHEAP VODKA ANY MORE.
Woman with red hair and round glasses: WE NEED TO GO UPSCALE WITHOUT SPENDING ANY MORE ON PRODUCTION. MARKETING, WHATCHA GOT?
(A third person, seen from behind, faces them across the table.)
Panel 2
A liquor bottle with a brown cap. Its label reads:
O'Finnegan's
PURE
Zero Malt
SCOTCH
Votey:
A hand-drawn graph. At the top: "Quality = 1 / malts". The vertical axis is labeled "Quality of Scotch" and the horizontal axis is labeled "malts", with tick marks numbered 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 ... up to the infinity symbol. The plotted curve starts extremely high near zero malts and drops off steeply, approaching zero as malts increase.
Alt text
A two-panel SMBC comic. Panel 1: three people sit at a table in a business meeting. A man in a suit says, "People just aren't buying cheap vodka any more." A red-haired woman with round glasses replies, "We need to go upscale without spending any more on production. Marketing, whatcha got?" A third person is seen from behind across the table. Panel 2: the marketing solution is a clear liquor bottle whose label reads "O'Finnegan's PURE Zero Malt SCOTCH" — rebranding cheap, malt-free liquor as premium scotch by boasting about having zero malts. Votey (aftercomic): a hand-drawn graph titled "Quality = 1 / malts," with a vertical axis labeled "Quality of Scotch" and a horizontal axis labeled "malts" running 0 to infinity. The curve spikes near zero malts and plummets toward zero as malts increase, jokingly proving that the fewer malts, the higher the quality — so zero malts is best.
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.