Surprise
Explanation
The Joke
A man is visited by a figure who says "Hey human, it's God." The man asks if he's a prophet, and God replies: "Nah, I just wanna chat." God then asks why humans are always surprised by things. God lists human behaviors: "You give birth and die. Sugar, you like. You eat dead things. You have weird religions and philosophies oriented around improper posture toward death." He concludes: "But rarely is it finally happening, everyone's surprised. It's for real this time."
The man responds that it "sounds like surprisingly normal news." The final panel shows a floating ghostly figure saying "Jheez, you humans are so weird."
The Humor
The comic uses God as a framing device to defamiliarize ordinary human existence. When God lists human behaviors — birth, death, eating dead things, religion — they sound bizarre and alien, even though they're completely mundane from a human perspective. The humor comes from the shift in perspective: everything humans do is objectively strange when described from an outside viewpoint.
The phrase "improper posture toward death" is a particularly clever formulation. It reframes all of human religion and philosophy as essentially being bad at accepting mortality — which is arguably accurate. Humans build elaborate belief systems, rituals, and institutions largely to cope with the fact that they die, and an omniscient being would reasonably find this puzzling.
The punchline — God finding humans weird for not being surprised by genuinely surprising things while being constantly surprised by predictable ones — captures a real paradox of human psychology. People are shocked by events that are statistically inevitable (their own aging, economic cycles, natural disasters) while remaining blasé about genuinely extraordinary aspects of existence (consciousness, the scale of the universe).
Broader Context
God appearing as a casual, bemused observer of humanity is a recurring SMBC device. Weinersmith's God is rarely judgmental or wrathful — instead, God tends to be confused, amused, or mildly exasperated by human behavior. This portrayal allows the comic to explore philosophical questions about human nature without the weight of theological debate.