break-it-down
Explanation
In this comic, someone is giving Hamlet -- the protagonist of Shakespeare's famous tragedy -- a productivity pep talk. The advisor tells him: "Whoa, whoa. The problem is you're thinking about this as one big job, and so you keep vacillating about whether to do it. But you can break it into a bunch of small, easy jobs you complete one at a time."
The caption delivers the punchline: "Thanks to task decomposition, Hamlet successfully revenge-killed his uncle and lived happily ever after."
The joke takes the modern self-help and productivity concept of "task decomposition" -- breaking a large, overwhelming project into smaller, manageable steps -- and applies it to the plot of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The entire tragedy of Hamlet hinges on the prince's inability to act decisively; he famously agonizes and procrastinates over avenging his father's murder by killing his uncle Claudius. The comic suggests that Hamlet's tragic flaw was really just a project management problem that could have been solved with a simple productivity hack.
The humor lies in the absurd deflation of one of literature's greatest psychological dramas into a mundane workplace efficiency issue. It also satirizes the modern tendency to reduce all human problems -- even deep existential and moral crises -- to simple life-hack solutions. The cheerful "lived happily ever after" ending further underscores the joke by replacing Shakespeare's famously bloody conclusion (in which nearly everyone dies) with a fairy-tale resolution, as if the right organizational framework was all that stood between Hamlet and a happy ending.