Years
Explanation
The Joke
A character with glasses and long hair passionately explains the extraordinary effort and expense involved in creating and transporting a single painting during the Renaissance. They describe how it took two to four years of artisanal work using rare, expensive dyes to construct a single painting, and then shipment took months -- if you were lucky enough that it was not lost at sea.
The punchline, delivered as a caption at the bottom of the comic, reframes all of this historical context through a modern lens: "If you measure inflation in the cost of sending nudes, we are all trillionaires." The joke is that when you consider how easy it is today to take and send a nude photo with a smartphone compared to commissioning a Renaissance painting (which often featured nude subjects), the "cost" of sending nudes has deflated so dramatically that we are all fabulously wealthy by that metric.
The Humor
The comedy hinges on a bait-and-switch. The setup presents what sounds like a serious art-history lecture about the painstaking process of Renaissance painting. The listener expects an elevated point about art, culture, or economics. Instead, the punchline pivots to the thoroughly modern and lowbrow concept of sending nudes. The juxtaposition between high Renaissance art and casual smartphone sexting creates the comedic surprise.
There is also a layer of absurdist economics humor in redefining "inflation" and "wealth" through this particular metric. The observation is technically valid -- the cost of transmitting an image of a nude human body has indeed dropped by many orders of magnitude -- but framing it as a measure of personal wealth is deliberately ridiculous.
References
The comic references the real historical practices of Renaissance painting, where pigments like ultramarine (made from lapis lazuli) were extraordinarily expensive, and completing a major work could indeed take years. The shipping of artworks across Europe by sea was also genuinely perilous. Many Renaissance paintings did depict nude figures, connecting the historical and modern meanings of "sending nudes." The economic concept of inflation is playfully repurposed here.