news-2
Explanation
In this comic, two characters are watching the news. One is stunned by how terrible the news is, remarking "Wow, more news. Jeezus." The other character asks, "Does it ever bother you that the stuff on the news is actually happening in real life?" The first character is astonished by this insight and says "Teach me your ways."
The punchline comes when the second character reveals the secret to their emotional equanimity: "I mostly read non-fiction like romance novels." The humor works on two levels. First, it is absurd to call romance novels "non-fiction," which is the surface-level joke. But the deeper joke is about coping mechanisms -- the character has such a tenuous grasp on the distinction between fiction and reality that the horrors of the news do not register as real to them, while the escapist fantasies of romance novels feel like truth. It satirizes how media consumption can warp our sense of what is real and what matters, and how some people deal with an overwhelming news cycle by essentially retreating into fiction while pretending it is the real world.