soap-opera
Explanation
The Joke
The comic shows a couple on a couch where one person says they can't watch soap operas because they're "too realistic." The other person responds with surprise ("Oh?"), and the first person explains their preference: they like Nabokov or Hemingway because in those works "stuff really matters" and things are "dark and romantic."
Their partner then points out that soap operas actually share key features with literary fiction: "In soap operas there's a continuing sense of looming catastrophe, nothing good ever happens, characters come and go for no reason, there is boring stuff going on repeat, only with just enough intrigue to continue on." The implication is that this describes literary fiction just as well as it describes soap operas.
In the final panel (labeled "Later"), the literary snob is shown reading a book and admitting "This is so good" — having essentially been convinced that the structures they love in highbrow literature are the same ones at work in soap operas. Or alternatively, they are now watching a soap opera and enjoying it.
The Humor
The humor lies in deflating literary snobbery by revealing that the structural elements people praise in "serious" literature — unresolved tension, characters appearing and disappearing, a pervading sense of doom, repetitive mundane details punctuated by moments of intrigue — are exactly the same elements found in daytime soap operas. The comic suggests that the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow entertainment is largely a matter of packaging and social prestige rather than genuine structural differences. The person who dismisses soap operas as "too realistic" while praising Nabokov and Hemingway is forced to confront the uncomfortable similarity between their refined tastes and the entertainment they consider beneath them.