Prize
Explanation
The Joke
The comic shows a man on a stage, dressed like an auctioneer, calling out bids: "All right, do I have $100,000? Yes, in the back. $100,000. Do we have $200,000? All right, going for $200,000! Do we have $500,000? Impeccable credentials, ladies and gentlemen. 500,000. Yes! The woman in front. Do I see 550?" The caption below reads: "The Nobel Prize in economics should be awarded via an auction system."
The joke is a self-referential economics gag. The Nobel Prize in Economics is supposed to recognize the best contributions to economic theory. The comic suggests that if economists truly believe in market mechanisms -- that prices efficiently allocate resources to their highest-valued use -- then the most economically consistent way to award the prize would be to auction it off to the highest bidder. The person willing to pay the most for the prize presumably values it the most, which, by market logic, means they "deserve" it.
The Humor
The humor lies in the delicious irony of applying economic theory to the prize that rewards economic theory. Economists frequently argue that auction mechanisms and market pricing are the most efficient ways to allocate goods and resources. So if they truly believe their own theories, why not apply them to the Nobel Prize itself? The joke exposes the tension between the idealized world of economic models (where everything should be priced and traded) and the real world (where prestige, merit, and recognition are supposed to be earned, not bought).
The auctioneer's comment "Impeccable credentials, ladies and gentlemen" while taking bids adds a wonderful layer of absurdity -- credentials are mentioned not as the basis for winning but as a selling point to drive up the bidding price, reducing academic achievement to a marketing pitch.
References
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (technically the "Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel") is awarded annually for outstanding contributions to economics. Auction theory is itself an important subfield of economics -- ironically, the 2020 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson for improvements to auction theory, making this comic particularly timely given its November 2020 publication date.