sing
Explanation
This comic shows two cats standing on a bed where a person is sleeping.
One cat says: "The human is doing that thing where it stops moving all night again." The other cat responds: "Let's sing until it wakes up!"
The caption reads: "The comic wasn't even funny, but it would be on the Internet long after you and everyone who ever knew your name was long dead."
The main panel is a straightforward cat joke — cats meowing at night while their owners try to sleep, reframed from the cats' perspective as "singing" to wake up a mysteriously motionless human. It's a relatable observation for any cat owner who has been woken up by yowling at 3 AM.
But the real joke is the caption, which is a brutally self-aware piece of meta-commentary. Zach Weinersmith is acknowledging that this particular comic isn't especially clever or original — it's a basic "cats are annoying at night" joke. Yet he points out that even mediocre internet content achieves a kind of immortality, outlasting both its creator and everyone who ever knew the creator. The caption transforms a forgettable cat comic into something unexpectedly existential — a meditation on digital permanence, legacy, and the unsettling fact that the internet's memory is both indiscriminate and eternal. The mundane comic becomes its own proof of concept.