2009-12-17
Explanation
This comic shows a romantic couple engaged in the classic spontaneous-travel trope. A man holds up a globe and tells a woman: "I'll spin this globe, and you throw the dart. Wherever it lands, we'll cast away our cares, and go there tonight. For love, my darling. For love." The woman is smiling and holding a dart, clearly charmed by the gesture.
The second part of the comic reveals the punchline: the product they are using is a "Magnetic Dart and Globe Kit" whose packaging advertises "Look Romantic!" and, in smaller text, "Always hits cheap part of Utah!" The dart and globe are rigged so that no matter where you throw the dart, it magnetically lands on an inexpensive, unexciting destination rather than somewhere truly exotic or adventurous.
The joke satirizes performative romanticism -- the idea of grand gestures that are actually calculated to cost as little as possible. The man gets to seem spontaneous and passionate while secretly ensuring the trip will be cheap. It also pokes fun at the globe-spinning trope itself, which appears frequently in movies and romance narratives but which nobody actually does in real life. The votey panel shows the globe breaking with the dart stuck in it. The man says "It... broke" while the woman enthusiastically declares "Center of the Earth!" -- taking the game to its absurd extreme by insisting they must now travel to the planet's core because that's technically where the dart ended up.