farming-life
Explanation
This comic romanticizes and then systematically deconstructs the fantasy of the simple farming life. It opens with a ghostly, idyllic vision of a great-great-grandmother describing the pastoral life: "being a simple farmer, looking after crops and herds." The listener exclaims "So beautiful!"
But then reality intrudes, panel by panel. "Doesn't that get in the way of the food?" "Sure did! Did you know in certain periods, the growth of cash crops destroyed livestock?" The ghost continues with increasingly grim details about farming life: having to worry about turning a profit, going out of stock, fluctuating prices, having to sell butter and cheese to pay the mortgage.
When the living person protests that they can only eat apples for so long and that their body starts to feel terrible and their muscles won't grow, the ghost cheerfully offers more farming hardship. The listener says "Okay, you know what, I think I'm going to get a more romanticized farming experience," to which the ghost replies: "Eventually you'll get used to the dysentery, which sounds pretty nice."
The comic skewers the modern tendency to romanticize pre-industrial agricultural life. Many people fantasize about escaping modern complexity for the "simple" life of farming, not realizing that historical farming was brutally hard, economically precarious, nutritionally limited, and plagued by disease. The ghost's cheerful tone while describing misery makes the contrast funnier -- she doesn't see these as complaints, just facts of life. The final dysentery joke is the cherry on top, suggesting that even the "bright side" of farm life is horrifying by modern standards.