2014-12-21
Explanation
The Joke
A boy prays to God: "Dear God, please don't worry about me. My sick auntie needs help more." God appears in a glowing orb and responds harshly: "Christ. Spare me the false humility. I don't have time for all of your passive-aggressive bullsh*t. Now what do you actually want?"
The boy answers: "Ten pounds of taffy." God laughs: "Ha! It was a test! You get nothing."
The boy asks "Don't you have better things to do?" God responds: "I exist beyond time. I can bust your balls twenty-four hours a day, bitch."
The Humor
The comic presents God as an omniscient, blunt, and somewhat petty being who sees through the boy's pious act immediately. The humor works on multiple levels: first, God calling out the prayer as "passive-aggressive" is funny because prayers of selfless petition often do carry an implicit "look how good I am" quality. Second, when the boy drops the act and honestly asks for taffy, God treats it as a failed test -- meaning there was no right answer. Third, the final exchange where God admits to having nothing better to do than harass a child ("I exist beyond time") is an absurd inversion of the concept of a loving, busy deity. The comic satirizes the transactional nature of prayer and the idea that God is simultaneously all-powerful and personally invested in testing individual humans.