cheetos
Explanation
This single-panel comic depicts a post-apocalyptic landscape of ruins and rubble, through which a giant disembodied hand crawls. The hand announces various economic data: "Cheetos are seven dollars. The mortgage rate is 1% higher now. The S&P 500 is down 476.23..." The caption below reads: "After humanity self-annihilated, the invisible hand of the market still roamed the planet, sorrowfully adjusting prices."
The joke takes the economic metaphor of the "invisible hand of the market" -- Adam Smith's famous concept describing how individual self-interest in a free market leads to beneficial outcomes for society -- and makes it literally visible and physical. The comic imagines the invisible hand as an actual giant hand that would persist even after humanity has destroyed itself, wandering through the wasteland and continuing to adjust prices for goods and services that no one is alive to buy.
The humor operates through absurdist literalization. There is something deeply funny and melancholy about a giant hand sadly announcing the price of Cheetos to no one in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. The word "sorrowfully" is doing significant comedic work, anthropomorphizing a theoretical economic concept with genuine grief. The comic also functions as a subtle critique of market ideology: even with humanity gone, the market mechanism mindlessly continues, suggesting it was never really about serving people in the first place.