ritual
Explanation
This comic depicts a man in a suit giving instructions that sound like an intense spiritual or shamanic ritual: "For 3 days you will not eat. For 3 days you will not drink. For 3 nights you will not sleep." This sets up the expectation of some profound mystical quest or vision quest. Then he delivers the punchline: "Then you will walk into a Chinese buffet."
The caption reads: "The suburban version of the visionquest reliably produces ecstatic transcendence." The joke is that the traditional Native American vision quest -- involving fasting, sleep deprivation, and isolation to achieve a spiritual revelation -- is reframed as the suburban experience of being extremely hungry and then going to an all-you-can-eat buffet. The "ecstatic transcendence" is just the overwhelming pleasure of eating a huge amount of food when you are starving.
The humor works by juxtaposing the sacred and the mundane. The setup borrows the language and gravitas of spiritual ritual, then reveals the punchline is something completely ordinary and gluttonous. It also slyly comments on how suburbanites might co-opt the language of spiritual seeking to describe what are essentially consumer pleasures, and how the physical sensation of satisfying extreme hunger might genuinely be one of the most transcendent experiences available to the average person.