2012-12-26
Explanation
This comic imagines what would happen if Shakespeare's Hamlet were set in a world with modern forensic science. A police officer tells Prince Hamlet that forensic analysis has determined with 100% certainty that his uncle Claudius murdered his father. Hamlet simply responds "Ah." The caption below reads: "The revised Hamlet was about 1/10th as long as the original."
The joke is that the entire plot of Hamlet -- one of the longest and most complex plays in the English language -- is driven by Hamlet's uncertainty about whether his uncle truly killed his father, his agonizing indecision about whether to act on the ghost's accusation, and his elaborate schemes (like the play-within-a-play) to confirm Claudius's guilt. If modern forensic science could simply prove the murder in the first act, all of Hamlet's existential angst, philosophical soliloquies, feigned madness, and the cascading tragedy that follows would be rendered unnecessary. The entire play would collapse into a straightforward murder case. It's a funny observation about how many great literary tragedies depend on information problems that modern technology has solved.