Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

The comic depicts a funeral eulogy where the speaker is trying to emphasize just how dead the deceased person is. Rather than offering comforting words or fond memories, the eulogist keeps elaborating on the thoroughness of the death: "He is so dead his consciousness is negative," "He is so dead the human race gets creeped out," and "He is so dead you could put the body next to a trilobite" (an animal that has been extinct for over 250 million years).

The format parodies the "roast" style of comedy, where comedians try to one-up each other with increasingly outrageous insults. The eulogist gets so carried away with the "so dead" riffing that someone in the audience grabs them and yells "Hey let go!" In the final panel, a mourner suggests to another, "You ever consider doing stand-up comedy?" and the other replies, "I think I am opening once somewhere but it is not for me."

The Humor

The comic plays on the awkwardness of funeral eulogies and the human tendency to cope with death through humor -- taken to an absurd extreme. Instead of the typical platitudes about the deceased being "in a better place," the speaker treats the funeral like a comedy set, riffing on how dead the person is as if doing a "yo mama" joke format ("he is so dead that..."). The final panel adds a meta layer by having the mourner casually consider stand-up comedy, as if the inappropriate eulogy was just a tryout set. The joke suggests that some people simply cannot resist turning any situation into material.

References

Trilobites are an extinct class of marine arthropods that lived from the Cambrian period (about 521 million years ago) through the end of the Permian period (about 252 million years ago). Mentioning them emphasizes extreme deadness by comparing the recently deceased to creatures that have been gone for hundreds of millions of years.