2011-12-02
Explanation
This comic is titled "Conversation Trick #57721: Self-Referential Phrases." It shows a man saying to another person: "I've got four words for you: four equals three."
The joke is a self-referential paradox. The man claims he has "four words" for the listener, but then says "four equals three" -- which is itself only three words. So the statement "I've got four words for you" is false because the phrase that follows contains only three words. But the content of those three words ("four equals three") is also mathematically false. However, in a meta sense, "four equals three" is trying to assert that the four promised words are actually three, which is what literally happened. So the statement is simultaneously wrong on its face and accidentally right about itself.
The comic plays with the common conversational phrase "I've got [number] words for you" (as in "I've got two words for you: you're fired") and turns it into a logic puzzle. The title framing it as "Conversation Trick #57721" suggests this is part of an absurdly long series of such tricks, and the high number implies the author has been cataloguing increasingly obscure and impractical conversational gambits.
The votey shows the cartoonist (Zach Weinersmith) at his drawing desk thinking: "Please let at least one person get this joke," acknowledging that this particular brand of self-referential mathematical humor is quite niche and he is worried it might go over most readers' heads.