exam-nightmare
Explanation
The Joke
The comic opens with a classic anxiety scenario: a person is having the "exam nightmare" -- "Oh my God, I'm having that nightmare where it's final exams, but I haven't read any of the books or attended any of the lectures." They then notice something: "Wait a sec, what's this?" and see the exam title: "Literary Theory of the Philosophy of the Sociology of the Philosophy Final Exam." The observing couple sees the sleeper smiling peacefully, and one says, "He must be having a wonderful dream."
The joke is a two-layered subversion. First, the dreamer initially panics because they are unprepared for their final exam (a universal anxiety dream). But then they realize the exam is in an absurdly convoluted and meaningless-sounding academic subject -- "Literary Theory of the Philosophy of the Sociology of the Philosophy" -- which is so meta-academic and vacuous that not having studied is irrelevant; nobody could possibly know this material because it barely means anything. This realization transforms the nightmare into a pleasant dream.
The Humor
The comic satirizes overly specialized and self-referential academic fields in the humanities and social sciences, where layers of theoretical abstraction can pile up to the point of seeming meaningless. The idea that a field could be "the philosophy of the sociology of the philosophy" suggests an infinite regress of navel-gazing disciplines studying each other. The humor also plays on the universal experience of the exam nightmare -- one of the most common anxiety dreams -- and the relief of realizing the exam does not actually matter. The observers misread his smile as contentment, not realizing it is the smile of someone who has realized they cannot fail at something that is nonsensical.