2012-06-27
Explanation
The comic tackles the classic philosophical question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" -- one of the deepest questions in metaphysics, famously posed by Leibniz. A woman asks a rabbi this question, and he gives a standard theological answer: the universe was created by God. The woman then follows up by listing some of the more terrifying features of that creation -- high-speed asteroids, gamma ray bursts, and the fact that most of the universe is lifeless vacuum -- to each of which the rabbi calmly agrees "Yes."
The punchline reformulates the original question into something far more pointed: "Why is there something and not nothing, and the something reealllly seems like it's trying to kill us?" The rabbi admits, "Well, that one's a little harder." The humor lies in the contrast between the serene theological confidence in answering the abstract philosophical question and the awkward difficulty of explaining why a supposedly benevolent creator made a universe so overwhelmingly hostile to life. This is a riff on the problem of evil (or more precisely, the problem of natural evil and cosmic indifference), reframed through astrophysics rather than traditional theological examples like disease or suffering.