sonnet
Explanation
The Joke
The comic is titled "Ben Jonson's Most Beautiful Sonnet Lines, Adjusted for Other Locations in Space." It takes the opening of a famous poem — "This grave partakes the fleshly birth, which cover lightly, gentle Earth" — and systematically replaces "Earth" with other celestial bodies and locations. The panels show the same poetic lines adapted for the Moon ("gentle foil"), Mars ("gentle Mars"), Mercury ("gentle Mercury"), Venus ("gentle Venus"), an unspecified moon ("gentle Mars?"), an asteroid ("gentle asteroid"), Planet Five, Saturn, and finally increasingly absurd entries like "this kid is super dead, no please cover lightly" for a barren landscape, and a version for deep space ("gentle cosmos" or similar).
Each panel illustrates the location in question, with a figure standing at a grave on that celestial body. As the locations get more extreme, the poem's gentle sentiment becomes increasingly absurd — the idea of a "gentle" burial on an asteroid or in the vacuum of space is comically inadequate.
The Humor
The humor works on multiple levels. First, there is the mechanical absurdity of simply swapping out one word in a poetic line and pretending the result is equally meaningful. Second, the comic highlights how Earth-centric our poetic traditions are — the tender image of being gently covered by earth (soil) only works because we happen to live on a planet called Earth, creating a poetic double meaning that completely falls apart on Mercury or an asteroid. The escalating ridiculousness of each location — from plausible alternatives like Mars to absurd ones like deep space — creates a comedic build. It is a classic SMBC move of taking a literary convention and stress-testing it against scientific reality.
References
The poem referenced is commonly attributed to Ben Jonson (1572-1637), the English playwright and poet. The specific lines are from his epitaph tradition. Note: the comic title says "Ben Johnson's" (with an 'h'), which is a common misspelling of Ben Jonson's name. The concept of adjusting poetry for other planets plays on the dual meaning of "earth" as both our planet's name and the soil/ground in which we bury the dead.