2011-09-26
Explanation
This comic takes the classic parent-child game of "Got yer nose!" and stretches it into a long con. In the first three panels, a father repeatedly plays the nose-grabbing game with his young red-haired child across what appears to be multiple occasions over time. Each time, the father says "Got yer nose!" and the child laughs and responds "Hahahaha! No you didn't!" The repetition establishes that this is a running gag between them, and the child is completely confident that it is just a silly game.
The final panel jumps ahead with the caption "15 years later..." and shows the now-grown child sitting in what appears to be a therapist's chair or similar setting, visibly distressed, saying "He built up my confidence for so many years that I never saw it coming." The implication is that the father actually did take the child's nose at some point, and the years of the child laughing it off and saying "No you didn't!" were all part of a long psychological setup to make the eventual real nose-theft all the more devastating.
The votey panel shows the father saying "I have taken your nose and deposited it in a Swiss bank. My price? One billion dollars." This adds to the absurdity by revealing the father's scheme was not just a prank but an elaborate ransom plot, treating the stolen nose as a valuable asset stored in a secure offshore account. The comic takes a universally innocent childhood interaction and reimagines it as a sinister long-term scheme, which is a quintessential SMBC move of finding dark humor in the mundane.