wisdom-2
Explanation
The Joke
The comic shows a bearded man standing in a used car lot, festooned with colorful pennant banners, delivering a speech that begins in the style of profound literary prose: "There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness; but there is a madness that is..." -- and then pivots abruptly into -- "FIFTY PERCENT OFF ALL PRE-OWNED VEHICLES THIS WEEKEND OOOOONLYYYYYYY!" The caption below reads: "Prior to his writing career, Herman Melville ran a used car dealership."
The Humor
The joke works by mashing together two wildly incompatible registers of language. The opening lines are a direct paraphrase of a passage from Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" (Chapter 96, "The Try-Works"), which contains genuinely beautiful, philosophically dense prose about wisdom, woe, and madness. The comic imagines that Melville's famously overwrought, elaborate prose style was not developed for literary purposes but was actually honed during a career as a used car salesman -- a profession stereotypically associated with fast-talking, high-pressure, bombastic salesmanship. The humor lies in the recognition that Melville's prose really does have a kind of hyperbolic, escalating, breathless energy that is not entirely unlike a car dealership radio ad.
References
The opening quotation paraphrases Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" (1851), specifically from Chapter 96. The actual Melville quote is: "There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness." Melville is famous for his dense, philosophical prose style, which the comic repurposes as sales patter.