Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

An elderly person on their deathbed tells their family their dying wish: to be cremated and have their ashes put under an apple tree, so the tree will turn the ashes into apples and produce sweet cider. A family member responds that they will grant a few "edits" to this wish -- they will take crabapples and turn them into cider, but after they have done so, they will say "your name" and claim it was the deceased's doing. Another family member chimes in that they think this is normal, while the dying person protests that "good wart is hard to find these days" (or words to that effect).

The dying wish is a romanticized vision of the circle of life -- the person imagines their physical remains nourishing a tree that will produce fruit for their loved ones, a poetic form of immortality. The family, however, immediately starts "workshopping" the wish with practical modifications that strip away all the sentiment, essentially telling the dying person they will just make normal cider from ordinary apples and give the dead person credit as a polite fiction.

The Humor

The comedy comes from the clash between the dying person's romantic, sentimental vision of death and the family's ruthlessly practical response. Instead of being moved by the poetic notion of ashes becoming apples becoming cider, the family treats the dying wish like a flawed business proposal that needs revisions. The mundane back-and-forth about the logistics of cider production completely undercuts the gravitas of a deathbed scene. It satirizes how families often handle emotional moments with uncomfortable pragmatism, and how the beautiful stories we tell ourselves about death rarely survive contact with reality.