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Explanation
The Joke
A man tells his friend about reading the poetry of William Vaughn Moody, quoting a beautiful passage about Pandora: "I heard her once, and once upon the peaks, a little after, thunder tore the sky..." He then describes how the book's preface mentioned Moody's habit of rhapsodizing about nature on walks -- and confesses that his own reaction was to feel how incredibly awkward that would be if someone did it today. This launches into an earnest, almost anguished meditation on why modern people cannot tolerate sincere expressions of beauty.
The man asks what has changed in only a hundred years that saying pretty things about trees and rocks now feels as embarrassing as splitting your pants. He wonders if it is rationality -- "Are we all so enlightened now that we can't hold anything to be sacred?" -- but the woman points out that even spiritual people feel weird about it. He despairs that poetry has been "handed over to activists and obscurantists" and admits that even though he knows he is wrong, he simply cannot imagine hanging out with a great writer while she says something nice about a flower.
The woman then delivers the punchline: "I'm sorry, but this conversation has gotten too honest for my comfort. Can you say something sarcastic about a shared insecurity we'd be better off discussing sincerely?" After a contemplative panel of the two standing in a vast landscape, the woman says, "Death is for suckers. I'm gonna live forever," and the man responds, "There we go!" -- they have retreated into exactly the defensive sarcasm the woman requested.
The Humor
This is one of SMBC's more reflective strips, and the humor is largely self-aware and structural. The comic itself is doing the very thing it describes: having a sincere, vulnerable conversation about why sincere, vulnerable conversations feel impossible in modern culture. The woman's request to switch to sarcasm is funny because it is so relatable -- she is openly acknowledging the defense mechanism even as she deploys it. And the final exchange ("Death is for suckers") demonstrates how easily and comfortably they slide into ironic bravado versus the discomfort of the preceding honest discussion.
The comic also works as meta-commentary on SMBC itself, which is a comic strip that primarily communicates through jokes, irony, and absurdity. Weinersmith is essentially confessing that the medium and culture he works in makes sincere beauty feel impossible, even when he recognizes the loss.
References
William Vaughn Moody (1869-1910) was an American poet and dramatist. The quoted passage is from his poem about Pandora, part of his ambitious verse drama "The Fire-Bringer" (1904), which retold the Prometheus myth. Moody was known for his lyrical, Romantic-influenced poetry, and died young at 41. The comic's observation that his style of sincere, rhapsodic engagement with nature now feels socially unacceptable speaks to broader cultural shifts toward irony, detachment, and what writer David Foster Wallace described as the dominance of irony in late 20th-century culture.