hunting-and-gathering
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Explanation
The Joke
A prehistoric caveman announces "I'm sick of hunting and gathering" and proposes an alternative: "What if instead we could have a grand, high-protein grain... planted it over and over on the same land, and we'd never have to deal with violence?" His companion points out the downsides: "We'd spend most of the year tending care of the crops and fighting vermin." The visionary caveman continues undeterred: "Then here's a variant: we could live mostly on grain-based foods that are designed to be robust to weather and climate conditions." A skeptic asks, "Do you seriously think the world would be a better place, though?" to which someone else responds: "Imagine a world with people like him in charge."
The final caption reads something to the effect of the irony being that the agricultural revolution, while enabling civilization, also brought famine, class stratification, and drudgery -- all the things the caveman was trying to avoid.
The Humor
The comic humorously dramatizes the paradox of the agricultural revolution. The caveman pitching farming sounds exactly like a naive tech startup founder promising to disrupt an industry, oblivious to all the new problems his innovation will create. The joke lands because the audience knows how the story ends: agriculture did enable civilization, but it also introduced backbreaking labor, inequality, and vulnerability to crop failure. The skeptical cavemen are proven both right and wrong by history, which is the ultimate punchline.
References
The comic references the Neolithic Revolution (roughly 10,000 BCE), when humans transitioned from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural settlements. Scholars like Jared Diamond have famously argued that agriculture was "the worst mistake in the history of the human race," a view the comic playfully dramatizes.