Reading people who hold emancipatory politics through the gap between their stated ideals and their petty conduct exposes comedy they cannot see in themselves. The humor comes not from mocking their beliefs but from showing how the beliefs coexist with vanity, jealousy and status-seeking.
Among comfortable intellectuals, worry and dissatisfaction function less as responses to real threat than as a way of occupying attention and signaling depth. The strips show characters cultivating their frustrations and neuroses as a kind of possession, something to display and discuss rather than resolve.
Adopting the vocabulary of liberation (sexual, feminist, psychoanalytic) does not by itself alter the underlying dynamics of coupling, parenting and social competition. Characters deploy progressive terms while reproducing the same jealousies, double standards and manipulations the terms were meant to dissolve.
When characters discuss politics, art or relationships, the conversation is repeatedly revealed to be about the speaker's own image and needs rather than the ostensible topic. Watching for whose ego a discussion actually serves turns apparently high-minded exchanges into portraits of narcissism.