The funny thing about Thanksgiving, or any huge meal, is that you spend 12 hours shopping for it and then chopping and cooking and braising and blanching. Then it takes 20 minutes to eat it and everybody sort of sits around in a food coma, and then it takes four hours to clean it up.

Allen’s joke hinges on the mismatch between effort and payoff: an elaborate holiday meal demands long hours of planning, shopping, and technique-heavy cooking, yet the actual eating is brief and followed by lethargy and a daunting cleanup. The humor comes from compressing the feast into a kind of absurd cost–benefit ledger. Beneath the punchline is a gentle critique of consumer and domestic ritual—how tradition can turn hosts into overworked producers—while also acknowledging the communal afterglow of a shared meal (the “food coma” as a collective pause). The quote validates both the pleasure and the exhaustion of celebratory cooking.