homemade
Explanation
In this comic, a person is reading a recipe blog on their computer. The screen shows a "Homemade Mimosa Recipe" that begins with a lengthy personal narrative: "I was trying to create the perfect mimosa and, after dozens of experiments, I'm prepared to share: When I was first learning to make these drinks, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the..."
The caption below reads: "14 hours of scrolling later, I realized I'd been scammed into reading classical literature."
The joke operates on two levels. First, it satirizes the well-known frustration with online recipe blogs that bury the actual recipe beneath thousands of words of personal anecdotes and life stories -- a universally recognized annoyance among internet users. Second, it takes this complaint to an absurd extreme by revealing that the preamble text is actually the opening of Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities." The word "scammed" is doing heavy comedic lifting here, treating exposure to classic literature as a form of fraud. There is also an ironic commentary on how people will readily consume vast quantities of text online (14 hours of scrolling) as long as they believe it is leading to something practical, but would never willingly sit down to read Dickens. The mimosa recipe -- one of the simplest cocktails imaginable (just champagne and orange juice) -- makes the absurdly long preamble even funnier.