2011-12-12
Explanation
This comic is titled "Confession Strategy: Try Humor!" A man is talking to another person (shown in silhouette) and sets up what sounds like a joke: "What's the difference between your wife and gonorrhea?" The other person responds "What?" and the man delivers the punchline: "I never gave gonorrhea syphilis!"
The humor operates on multiple levels. On the surface, it follows the structure of a classic "What's the difference" joke, but the punchline is not really a joke at all -- it is a confession. The man is admitting that he gave the other person's wife syphilis (a sexually transmitted disease), and by extension that he had an affair with her. He is using the joke format as a "confession strategy" to soften the blow of delivering extremely bad news.
The absurdity lies in the idea that wrapping a devastating personal betrayal in the form of a bar joke would somehow make it more palatable. The title banner framing this as a legitimate "confession strategy" adds to the dark humor, as if this were advice from a self-help guide. The joke-within-a-joke structure also means the punchline works both as a terrible joke and as a genuinely horrible revelation.
The votey shows the man in a bathtub thinking: "Just bought myself half an epistemology joke," which is a meta-joke about the nature of knowledge -- specifically, the philosophical question of whether you can truly "know" something. Buying "half" an epistemology joke suggests incomplete knowledge, which ties back to the main comic's theme of partial, badly delivered revelations.