spirit-4
Explanation
This single-panel comic jokes about the difficulty of setting haunted house or ghost stories in the Middle East.
A man is lying in bed reading a book when a ghost appears. Instead of being frightened, the man angrily responds: "No! I don't care! Cities have been here 5000 years and there's literally no way to not build on an ancient temple or graveyard! Fuck off, ghost!"
The caption reads: "It's hard to set haunting movies in the Middle East."
The joke plays on a classic horror movie trope, particularly common in American horror films: the revelation that a house was "built on an ancient burial ground" or sacred site, which explains why it's haunted. This trope works in the context of relatively young countries like the United States, where building on a centuries-old Native American burial ground is treated as an unusual and specific transgression.
However, in the Middle East -- home to some of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world (Damascus, Jerusalem, Aleppo, etc.) -- virtually every piece of land has thousands of years of human history beneath it. Temples, graveyards, battlefields, and sacred sites are layered on top of each other going back millennia. The joke is that the "built on ancient sacred ground" trope becomes meaningless when literally everywhere is ancient sacred ground. The man's irritation suggests this is not his first ghost encounter -- he's simply fed up with the constant hauntings that are an unavoidable consequence of living in a region with such deep history.
The humor also works because of the tonal contrast: the man treats a supernatural visitation not with terror but with the exasperation of someone dealing with a minor, recurring nuisance -- like a neighbor's noisy dog.