Afterlife
Explanation
The Joke
A person dies and arrives in the afterlife, where they discover that the afterlife is just another life — with all the same problems, tedium, and existential dread. There's still work to do, bureaucracy to navigate, and mortality to face (you can die again and go to a further afterlife, which is also just more of the same).
The Humor
The comic is a riff on the idea that heaven would actually be terrible if you think about it carefully. Eternal bliss sounds good in the abstract, but what does it look like concretely? SMBC's answer — that any concrete existence involves the same fundamental human problems — is both funny and genuinely unsettling. It's an infinite regress of disappointing afterlives.
Philosophical Context
This connects to Bernard Williams's argument that immortality would be intolerable because an eternal being would eventually exhaust all possible sources of meaning and motivation. It also echoes the Buddhist concept of samsara — the cycle of rebirth as something to escape from, not aspire to.