2014-12-20
Explanation
The Joke
This is a retelling of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol." The Ghost of Christmas Future shows Scrooge his future: "Scrooge! Behold the future if you do not change your ways!" Scrooge sees a book showing the date of his death. He is shown his gravestone. The ghost says: "I give you silence for revelation." Scrooge reads: "Years of regret, sorrow, and all dark."
But instead of being reformed, Scrooge's takeaway is purely financial: "A week? And a week of thought have really changed me. Sorrow!" In the final panel, Scrooge has "got the Christmas spirit" -- but he's standing over a pile of gold coins, having apparently just calculated how to profit from the information about his future rather than becoming a better person.
The Humor
The comic subverts the classic moral of "A Christmas Carol" by having Scrooge respond to his ghostly visitation not with genuine reform but with a financial calculation. In Dickens' original, seeing his own death transforms Scrooge into a generous person. Here, Scrooge is so fundamentally a miser that even supernatural intervention only makes him think about money in a different way. The joke suggests that some people are so deeply set in their ways that even the most dramatic interventions will be filtered through their existing worldview. It is a cynical take on whether people can truly change.