Reduce Your Payments
Reduce Your Payments
[Cueball sits on a sofa and Blackhat walks into the frame from behind.] Blackhat: I discovered this weird trick for reducing your mortgage payments! Cueball: What? Blackhat: Sodium borohydride. Cueball: ...I hate you.

Black Hat walks into a room where Cueball sits in an armchair. Black Hat says to Cueball that he can reduce his mortgage payments, while holding a docket of paper, presumably Cueball's payment check, that looks like it has been dipped into a liquid of some kind. Black Hat uses the same formulation many Internet advertisements use: "Discover this (strange/new/amazing...) trick to (lose weight/reduce your mortgage payments/meet amazing women...)" known as clickbait . Cueball wants to know how and Black Hat responds by mentioning sodium borohydride (NaBH 4 ) . Since Cueball fell for Black Hat's bait he exclaims, "I hate you."
Sodium borohydride is a strong reducing agent , meaning in a chemical reaction it will " reduce " another substance. It is in fact used during the manufacture of paper , in order to bleach the natural colour from the pulp and improve the resulting paper's brightness, opacity, ink-absorption, and strength (among other properties).
This comic is a typical switcharound pun. Cueball expects the value on a bill paid to be reduced, while Black Hat uses the chemical meaning of reducing , which would result at a minimum in the bleaching of all ink from the bill therefore making it unreadable.
The complementary chemical reaction to reduction is oxidation (mentioned in 1693: Oxidation ), which is what happens if the paper mortgage payment is burned, as referred to in the title text. They go together in redox reactions, which generally involve electron transfer from the chemical species which is oxidized to the one which is reduced. In that case, the pun about light (to start a fire) is that a reduced financial weight may seem light (not heavy). However, some forms of paper - particularly those used for i.e. receipts - possess a slight coating that limits their flammability. Cueball's statements appear to be made with such a paper, thus preventing Black Hat from burning the statements.
[Cueball sits on a sofa and Blackhat walks into the frame from behind.] Blackhat: I discovered this weird trick for reducing your mortgage payments! Cueball: What? Blackhat: Sodium borohydride. Cueball: ...I hate you.
