Rapture
Explanation
The Joke
The comic is a four-panel strip set at a beach. In the first panel, people are enjoying a normal day at the beach. In the second panel, the sky begins to glow intensely as a brilliant star-like light appears in the sky. In the third panel, a woman screams: "Oh my God! It's the Rapture!" In the fourth panel, it is revealed that the beings being lifted into the heavens by a beam of light are not humans — they are dolphins, being raptured out of the ocean while the humans stand on the shore watching.
The comic subverts the Christian concept of the Rapture — the belief that the faithful will be bodily taken up to heaven — by revealing that God's chosen creatures are not humans at all, but dolphins. The humans are left behind, mere bystanders to a divine event that was never about them in the first place.
The Humor
The comedy relies on a classic misdirect. The first three panels build up dramatic tension using all the visual language of a Rapture scenario: the glowing sky, the shocked onlookers, the declaration that it's happening. The reader naturally assumes humans will be taken up. The fourth panel's reveal — dolphins ascending in a beam of light — is both absurd and oddly logical, given dolphins' popular reputation as intelligent and benevolent creatures. There is an implicit theological joke: if God were to choose the most deserving species, maybe humans wouldn't make the cut.
References
The Rapture is a concept in certain branches of Christian eschatology (particularly premillennial dispensationalism) in which believers are taken bodily into heaven before or during the end times, based on passages such as 1 Thessalonians 4:17. Dolphins are frequently cited in popular culture as among the most intelligent non-human animals, and Douglas Adams famously joked in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" that dolphins were actually smarter than humans.