the-best-day-ever
Explanation
The Joke
The comic opens with what appears to be a heartwarming scene: a father and daughter are playing at the beach. The daughter shouts "Faster Papa, faster!" and the father responds "Ha! Okay, sweet pea!" The daughter then says "This is the best day! I am gonna remember this for the rest of my life!" — a classic sentimental family moment.
Then the bottom panel delivers the gut punch with a narrator's text: "Later, it turned out the people in the comic were just pictures, without any past or any future. Less than dead, they never were."
The Humor
The comic is a darkly meta joke about the nature of fictional characters and illustrations. It sets up a deeply emotional, nostalgic family moment — the kind designed to tug at heartstrings — and then ruthlessly undercuts it by reminding the reader that these are just drawings on a page. The characters have no consciousness, no memories, no future. They are "less than dead" because they never existed in the first place.
The humor comes from the jarring tonal whiplash between the saccharine sentimentality of the scene and the cold, nihilistic observation that follows. It is also a commentary on how easily we are emotionally manipulated by fiction — we were genuinely feeling warm feelings about ink on paper. Weiner is poking fun at both the reader's willingness to feel emotions for fictional characters and the broader question of what it means to "exist" or "matter."