epic-2
Explanation
This comic shows a group of medieval or ancient soldiers, with one addressing the others: "Wait, wait. You think it's an epic? The story where the guy comes out of the woods, bangs a prostitute for 7 days straight, gets superpowers, wrestles the king till they're best friends, then gets killed immediately? You thought that was serious?"
The caption reads: "Time travel completely changed our understanding of The Comedy of Gilgamesh."
The joke is a reclassification of the Epic of Gilgamesh -- one of the oldest known works of literature, dating back to ancient Mesopotamia. The comic imagines that a time traveler went back and discovered that the ancient Sumerians never intended the story to be a serious epic at all -- they meant it as a comedy. And when you actually list out the plot points of Gilgamesh as the character in the comic does (Enkidu living in the wild, being "civilized" by sleeping with a temple prostitute for a week, then wrestling King Gilgamesh and becoming his best friend, then dying), it does sound absurd enough to be a comedy. The humor lies in the idea that thousands of years of literary scholarship treating Gilgamesh as a solemn epic might be entirely wrong -- a misreading that could only be corrected by time travel. The title "The Comedy of Gilgamesh" is a perfect counterpoint to "The Epic of Gilgamesh," recasting the whole work.