The comics that make us laugh the hardest tend to be the ones with the biggest kernels of truth wrapped up inside. Calvin and Hobbes wouldn't be what it was without its profound philosophical insights, and now the best contemporary cartoonists are re-rendering the world around them in simple, amusing frames. By taking certain social perplexities and putting them in a place where we laugh openly at them, we gain a certain insight as to why people do some of the things they do. 

Ryan Pequin's Three Word Phrase does a better job at tackling the institution of the bro than many an extended comic engagement with the subject. You can thinly parody frat boys all you like, but it takes a vicious sense of humor to really get at the core of that hypermasculinity present on college campuses across the country. 

Three Word Phrase has been up and running since about 2009, but recently took off when a few of its strips went viral across Tumblr and other channels. It has a readership of a few thousand now, and despite its ballooning popularity still features great work on a regular basis. Pequin has made so many strips that are just daft genius--absurd and inexplicable and yet someone entirely spot-on--but it's his bro comics that get me giggling the hardest.

In some ways, the comic deconstruction of the bro is the perfect way to tackle a rather ugly facet of American adolescence. These are the guys whose subculture includes aimless violence, dangerous inebriation, and getting away with rape on a regular basis. What's more, they're not demonized in popular culture; these aren't the bad guys, they're just an extension of the "boys will be boys" mantra. 

But what leads someone to become that kind of ultra-aggressive manchild, even after high school has become just a memory and the responsibilities of legal adulthood start to set in? Pequin looks at some of the emotional roots of the collective behavior of the bro. He speculates about some of the unfulfilled emotional needs that might lead to that over-tough exterior: homosexuality, maybe, or just frustrated sexuality in general, or an unwillingness to accept the transition to adulthood, or a lack of real social skills causing a strange formation of anti-social sociability. And, of course, he does all this with some of the sharpest humor being produced on the internet today. He goes to some dark places, but treats them with such absurdity as to disarm them.