together-2
Explanation
The Joke
An anthropologist addresses an audience, saying she has been an anthropologist for 40 years and that there is one thing that explains how humans are brought together: religion. However, she then asks, "How will we do it?" and answers that "Cults/crones are pretty good too, but only for about 24 hours. You can string them along, take turns, of course, but after a while it stops working." When someone asks "What about our shared humanity?" the anthropologist responds with maniacal laughter: "AHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHA!"
The joke is that the anthropologist, who has spent her entire career studying what brings humans together, has concluded that lasting unity is essentially impossible. She dismisses shared humanity as laughably naive, and even the mechanisms that do work (religion, communal rituals) are only temporary or eventually break down.
The Humor
The comic derives its humor from the gap between the hopeful framing and the deeply cynical conclusion. The audience expects an uplifting answer about the human spirit, but the expert -- who presumably knows better than anyone -- finds the very idea of "shared humanity" as a unifying force to be hilarious. The anthropologist's manic laughter at the suggestion is the punchline, suggesting that decades of studying human cultures have led her to a bleakly funny conclusion: humans are fundamentally difficult to keep together, and anyone who thinks otherwise has not been paying attention. It plays on the trope of the academic who has studied a subject so long that they have become nihilistic about it.