2009-11-25
Explanation
This comic is about a doctor delivering bad news to a patient's family after surgery. In the first panel, a woman asks the doctor how the operation went. The doctor picks up a napkin and says, "Imagine this napkin represents your lungs," then proceeds to burn a hole in the napkin with a lighter. In the third panel, the patient resignedly says, "So, smoking finally did me in," and the doctor awkwardly confirms, "Uh, pretty much, yeah." But the final panel, labeled "Earlier...", reveals that the doctor had actually just accidentally burned the patient's lungs during surgery while exclaiming "Whoops!"
The humor comes from the misdirection. The doctor's napkin demonstration initially appears to be a dramatic visual metaphor for how smoking has destroyed the patient's lungs. The patient even accepts this explanation, believing their smoking habit has finally caught up with them. But the flashback reveals that the doctor is actually covering up his own surgical malpractice -- he literally burned the patient's lungs himself, and is now using the patient's smoking history as a convenient excuse to hide his incompetence.
The votey panel shows a death certificate that reads "Cause of Death: Second Hand Smoke," which is the final layer of the joke. The term "second hand smoke" normally refers to inhaling someone else's cigarette smoke, but here it's a darkly literal description: the smoke damage was caused by a second person's hand (the doctor's) rather than the patient's own smoking. It's technically accurate while being completely misleading.