2013-03-05
Explanation
This comic opens with a man wishing "Happy Birthday, Sally!" and Sally responding with the classic cynical quip: "Bah! It's just one more step toward the grave." The man objects to her attitude, but Sally doubles down with a philosophically accurate observation: a year is just the arbitrary marking of the time it takes Earth to travel around the Sun, and birthdays aren't some special step toward the grave -- everything is a step toward the grave.
The punchline comes when Sally, having established that mortality is omnipresent and not unique to birthdays, asks why it's only on her birthday that people remind her of death -- by making her wear "spiked hats" (party hats with pointed tops), putting fire near her face (birthday candles), and feeding her "loads of cholesterol" (birthday cake). The man's response, "Gotta have a sense of humor," reframes birthday traditions as a kind of darkly comic death ritual.
The humor works by taking Sally's initial cliche pessimism ("birthdays remind us of death") and twisting it: she's not upset about aging, she's upset about the genuinely dangerous-sounding birthday traditions. When you strip away the cultural familiarity, party hats, open flames near your face, and unhealthy food do sound like a weirdly hostile way to celebrate someone. It's a great example of SMBC's technique of defamiliarizing everyday customs to make them seem absurd.