2010-01-24
Explanation
This comic tackles the concern that the internet reduces great works of art to oversimplified emotional reactions. In the main panel, a man sitting at a laptop muses: "I worry the internet turns art into memetic reductions. I mean, if they were published today, how would we respond to Shakespeare'''s Hamlet? To Voltaire'''s Candide? To Nabokov'''s Lolita?" A woman next to him responds dismissively: "Pfft. That'''s easy. Here, I'''ll email you." Below the panel, the answer is displayed as three emoticons: a sad face :( for Hamlet, a smiley face :) for Candide, and an ambivalent/conflicted face :/ for Lolita.
The humor lies in how devastatingly accurate the reduction is. Hamlet is fundamentally a tragedy (sad face). Candide is a satire that ultimately arrives at optimism (happy face). And Lolita -- a brilliantly written but deeply disturbing novel about a pedophile -- naturally elicits a conflicted, uncomfortable reaction (the :/ face). The joke is both a confirmation of the man'''s fear and a rebuttal: yes, the internet reduces things to simple emotional shorthand, but maybe those reductions are not entirely wrong.
The votey panel extends the gag with another entry: "Catch-22" paired with a sleeping face emoticon (-.-)zzz, suggesting the book is boring or puts people to sleep. This is a playful jab at Catch-22'''s famously dense and circular prose style, which some readers find exhausting despite its literary merit.