Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

live-forever

2016-02-17 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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live-forever
Votey panel for live-forever
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Explanation

The Joke

A woman tells a man she would not want to live forever. Her argument: first you would have sex with 100 partners at once, then 300, then 4,000, and so on. Sure, it would be fun for a while, but eventually you would hit the biggest number and it would get pointless. The man asks: "Biggest number?" She confirms: "Yeah, the biggest number... 1,343." When the man asks "What about 1,344?" the woman has an epiphany, shouts "I WANT TO LIVE! I WANT TO LIIIIIIVE!!" and rushes off in excitement.

The Humor

The comic works on two levels. First, it parodies the common philosophical argument against immortality -- that eternal life would eventually become boring because you would exhaust all possible experiences. The woman'''s version of this argument is amusingly focused entirely on sex, revealing her priorities. Second, the real punchline is her mathematical error: she believes 1,343 is the largest number that exists. When the man points out that 1,344 exists, she realizes there are more numbers (and thus more experiences) available than she thought, and immediately reverses her position on immortality. The joke satirizes how people sometimes reach profound-sounding philosophical conclusions based on fundamentally flawed premises, and how easily those conclusions collapse when the error is exposed.

View History (1) Original Comic