social-longevity

A single-panel comic. A caption across the top reads: "The worst thing about extreme longevity was the increased quantity of social distinctions." An ancient man with a long gray beard, round glasses, and a wizard-like robe gestures imperiously toward a tired-looking woman in the foreground, declaring: "I have tenure level 14. You can't even look at my reflection!" The joke imagines academic tenure as an endlessly escalating hierarchy of pompous privileges for the extremely long-lived. The votey (aftercomic) is a handwritten list of tenure levels and their perks: 1 = Can't be fired; 10 = Can't be spoken to; 100 = Can't be thought of; 1000 = Can eat students; 10,000 = Can get out of one committee meeting per semester. The punchline is that the absurdly high level only earns the most trivial relief.