2014-06-18
Explanation
The Joke
A man offers to let another person try a machine that "artificially makes you experience an existential crisis." The customer panics: "AAAH! But... if I can have such a personal experience at the whim of some mindless arrangement of metal, perhaps I'm just some mindless arrangement of carbon!" The vendor says, "That'll be forty bucks." The customer then asks what is actually in the machine. The answer: "Nothing." The customer screams again, and the vendor repeats, "Forty bucks."
The Humor
The comic operates on multiple levels of irony. First, the machine supposedly induces an existential crisis, and it works — but not through any technological mechanism. The customer's crisis comes from simply thinking about the implications of a machine being able to trigger deep personal feelings, which leads him to question whether human consciousness is any more meaningful than a mechanical process. When he learns the machine contains nothing, he has a second existential crisis, because it means his profound philosophical despair was triggered by literally nothing at all — further confirming his fear that human experience is arbitrary and meaningless. The vendor, meanwhile, is completely unfazed and just wants his money, embodying a pragmatic indifference to existential questions. The joke suggests that existential crises are self-generating — you do not need any external stimulus to have one, just a sufficiently anxious mind.