stare
Explanation
This comic imagines a role reversal between humans and robots. A large robot is explaining to what appears to be a robot doctor or technician that its pet human "was just having it read some human history aloud and it seized up. Won't talk, won't eat. Just stares like there's something far away but it can't focus."
The caption below reads: "Inadvertently Calculac-4000 had bricked the human."
The joke works on multiple levels. First, it reverses the human-robot relationship so that robots keep humans as pets or curiosities. Second, it applies the tech term "bricked" (meaning a device has been rendered non-functional, like a brick) to a human being. The human has essentially experienced an existential crisis from confronting the full scope of human history -- wars, atrocities, suffering -- and has become catatonic. The humor is dark: the robot innocently "broke" the human just by making it read its own species' track record. It's a commentary on how confronting the totality of human history could be psychologically devastating if absorbed all at once.