What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive?

Kupcinet’s quip contrasts two modern cultural slogans—Nietzsche’s provocative “God is dead” (often taken as shorthand for secularization or the decline of traditional religious authority) and the pop-culture myth that “Elvis is alive” (a tongue-in-cheek expression of celebrity worship and conspiracy-minded fandom). The humor comes from the implied inversion of values: a society that treats transcendent meaning as obsolete while granting near-immortality to entertainment icons. The line functions as social satire, lamenting a perceived shift from spiritual or philosophical seriousness toward mass-media fixation and the elevation of celebrity to quasi-religious status.