after-2
Explanation
This comic explores the absurdity of human behavior around death and the afterlife.
The strip opens with a character asking why humans engage in behaviors that go far beyond what evolution requires for survival: seeking status beyond reproductive needs, caring about things after death, and believing in an afterlife despite being "clever enough to know we are clever." The other character responds "it's totally rational" and then provides a series of increasingly strained justifications. Because after you die, every generation that says your name gives you a "second" in the afterlife -- a reference to the popular idea that you live on as long as someone remembers you. This leads to the punchline: "Shakespeare must be doing great," followed by "Hemingway must be going nuts," implying that Hemingway, whose name is spoken frequently but often in the context of his troubled life, alcoholism, and suicide, must be having a terrible time in his "afterlife seconds."
The humor comes from taking a sentimental platitude ("you live on through memory") and treating it with absurd literalism. If every mention of your name gives you one literal second of afterlife consciousness, then famous people would experience the afterlife as a bizarre, fragmented existence -- a few seconds here and there across centuries. The joke about Hemingway specifically works because his legacy is so associated with suffering that even his afterlife would presumably be unpleasant. The comic also satirizes how humans rationalize irrational beliefs by dressing them up in pseudo-logical frameworks.