Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

Death (personified as a robed figure with a scythe) is tired of being feared and hated. Death points out that without death, life would have no urgency, no stakes, and no meaning. Every experience is precious precisely because it's finite. Death argues that immortality would be far worse than mortality — and has a point.

The Humor

The comic uses personified Death as a mouthpiece for a philosophical argument that's been made by many thinkers: that death gives life meaning. It's funny because Death is essentially making a PR argument for itself, and doing so rather convincingly. The joke is that the thing we fear most might be the thing that makes everything else valuable.

Philosophical Context

The argument that death gives life meaning has been made by philosophers from Epicurus to Heidegger to Bernard Williams. The comic version is closest to Heidegger's "being-toward-death" — the idea that awareness of mortality is what gives human existence its characteristic urgency and authenticity. Without the deadline of death, we might postpone everything forever.