When you die, if you get a choice between going to regular heaven or pie heaven, choose pie heaven. It might be a trick, but if it's not, mmmmm boy!

This line is characteristic of Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts,” the deadpan, faux-philosophical one-liners he wrote for NBC’s Saturday Night Live, where they were typically delivered in a calm voiceover as short comedic interludes. Handey’s “Deep Thoughts” pieces circulated widely in the early 1990s and were later collected in bestselling books. The joke’s setup—an afterlife choice framed like a consumer decision—fits the recurring “Deep Thoughts” pattern of taking a lofty subject (death, heaven, morality) and undercutting it with a childish, sensory craving and a sudden, self-aware aside (“It might be a trick…”).

The humor comes from collapsing metaphysical stakes into appetite and suspicion. “Regular heaven” is treated as a default product, while “pie heaven” sounds like an irresistible upgrade—yet the speaker immediately worries it could be a scam, as if the afterlife were a rigged promotion. The final “mmmmm boy!” punctures any remaining solemnity, revealing the narrator’s priorities as impulsive and bodily rather than spiritual. Like many “Deep Thoughts,” the line parodies inspirational wisdom by offering advice that is simultaneously confident and absurd, suggesting how easily human desire can override prudence even in imagined ultimate moments.