sunset
Explanation
The Joke
Someone asks an economist "Can you put a price on a sunset?" and follows up with "How much would you have to be paid to never see a sunset again?" The economist takes this question seriously and starts calculating: with 8 billion people on Earth, a reasonable per-person endowment, divided over a remaining lifespan, multiplied by some factor for aesthetic value, and so on. A second character objects, saying "Someday the people will rise up and annihilate the microeconomists." The economist's companion responds with "Pff. Good luck solving that collective action/agent coordination problem."
The Humor
The comic satirizes the tendency of economists to quantify everything, even things most people consider priceless or sacred, like the beauty of a sunset. The first layer of humor is the economist earnestly trying to calculate the dollar value of never seeing a sunset again, treating a poetic question as a literal optimization problem. The second layer is the revolutionary who threatens that people will eventually rebel against this kind of reductive economic thinking, only to be dismissed with the observation that organizing such a revolution is itself a collective action problem -- the very kind of problem economists study. The economists are essentially immune to revolution because they understand exactly why revolutions are hard to organize. It is a joke about economics being both infuriating and frustratingly correct about its own indestructibility.