Cartoon analysis

This comic discusses the issue of misplaced worries and paranoia, and how we deal with situations that are much more dangerous than we perceive.

In the comic, a woman refuses to ride a plane while talking on the phone in a car that she's driving. She then sends a text message in heavy traffic, which statistics have shown is much more dangerous than riding in a plane.

The comic was posted December 2, 2010 and the most recent notable attack on an airplane at the time was the underwear bombing in 2009. It's posted from America on the internet, so anyone with the web address could access it. It is very straightforward in telling us that we have misplaced our fears.

Zach Weiner is an American cynic with seemingly liberal tendencies. He is a pure comedian that sometimes focuses on making fun of occasional illogical fallacies in common human thought trends. He also writes comedic skits archived in SMBC Theatre.


Weiner pokes fun at the fact that we are so scared of airplanes due to a very small number of incidents, when we do such dangerous things on a regular basis. Texting while driving is MUCH more likely to kill you than a relatively safe airplane. The delivery of this is very ironic, in that it has the ignorant woman refusing to do something safe while doing something incredibly dangerous.

Here, the words and images contradict each other, the second image clearly shows how much danger she's putting herself in, while she herself in the text concludes that a plane is much more dangerous. In a sense, it's showing how much the terrorism has worked. We, as a country, are now illogically afraid of some pretty safe airplanes now that terrorists have wrecked some of them.

The woman pretty much resembles the whole of the ignorant society that believes that planes are incredibly dangerous, and haven't seen the statistics behind texting while driving.