Comic reality

One of the odd things about comedy is that it often has to be more honest than non-fiction does and frequently more honest than the comedian intends. In interviews, the writers for The Simpsons say they admire Lisa more than Bart. The show admires Bart more than Lisa.

The following joke graph has a similar reversal of intention:

The immediate truth—and the point of the joke—is that the people represented by the blue line are insane. And while the thing is fictional, we all know such people exist. So if you want to be rational—remembering that rational is not a synonym for right—you want to be in either the green group or the red group.

But here is the odd thing, the lie in the joke as it were. There are lots of polls on American attitudes towards global warming claims and average American opinion is actually very slowly shifting and stable and not at all like the blue line. So who exactly does the blue line represent? It isn't the people the comedian responsible for this thought they were aiming at.

We can see the bias of the comedian in the green line being labeled "everyone else". We are clearly meant to think this is what sane, rational people think. But if the label on the blue line is a lie, then so is the label on the green one. The green people don't exist. We might wonder if the comedian hasn't inadvertently made their joke funnier and more pointed than they intended by representing the conservatives with red and the "other Americans" with blue.

The graph is from a site called GraphJam and I learned about them courtesy of James McGrath.