Smooth lions are eating me: A study

This comic strip is great for two reasons.

Four panel cartoon by Branson Reese: "The person who discovered sharks". A bare-chested man walks into the sea, from an empty desert landscape decorated by one palm tree, saying "I am going into the big wetness." He disappears under the surface. A word balloon from under the water says "Smooth lions are eating me."

First, it's a funny joke delivered with wit and elegance. The thing about sharks, from a humanist perspective, is that they're extremely simple beings. There's no surprises there. If you're the first person on Earth since we started living on land to ever see a shark, that would be a tremendous discovery, except the beginning and the end of that encounter is that the sharks eat you. There's conceit, hubris and karma here; the indomitable, ever expanding, ever curious human spirit brought low by "smooth lions".

There's a saying that good reconnaissance, good research, good science starts with good description, and this poor man is doing a fine job describing his doom in what we can easily imagine is the simple terms available to him translated into English from caveman grunts.

This also serves the joke: the simplicity of the words. It might have been more scientifically accurate to have the man say something along the lines of "legless lions are eating me", but that extra syllable, in my opinion as an amateur comedian, makes the line about 50% less punchy and 20% less funny. "Smooth" is close enough for rock and roll, "smooth" works for the joke. It's the kind of shorthand you use in comic strips, like putting a doctor in a white labcoat or putting coconut shell sounds in place of hoofbeats. (That last one is more relevant in media with sound.) What's realistic doesn't necessarily create the effect you're going for in a work.

I'm vigorously defending this word choice because of the second reason. If you didn't know, the strip really blew up on twitter back when, because everyone and their dog came out of the woodwork to tell Branson that shark skin is in fact rough and Branson stonewalled them each, individually, with the steely eyed dedication to refuting facts of a hardcore flat-earther.

Why is this so great? Don't I usually despise the kind of people who think they "can decide their own facts"? (Quote from, I believe, an authentic Trump supporter.) I'm glad you asked, dear imaginary reader. I'm sure Branson didn't do his research on this strip and was caught out completely, because really, why wouldn't you picture sharks being smooth? And it looks like he's just decided he's going to die on the hill of "I didn't do anything wrong". Enough to fool a lot of very boring people who're getting on twitter and jumping in a long line of people telling Branson he's wrong to tell Branson he's wrong, anyway.

See, every one of these jackasses except maybe the first one are using the Internet wrong. Listen to the words they're using, especially after Branson tells them their facts are unwelcome. They're not tweeting to help Branson get his facts straight; they're tweeting because they take pleasure in telling a person they don't know that he's wrong, in the most negative, most pedantic, most unhelpful and (because there's so many of them who could not be bothered to look around or even wait a minute to see if anyone else might say the thing they were going to) most repetitive and least self-aware way possible. That's something we as a global community need to fight. With sarcasm if we have to.

Man, I'm not going to miss that website.