2013-09-04
Explanation
In this two-panel comic, a person is reading a book and complaining loudly about grammar errors: "Ugh. Another grammar error. Oh and it'''s in a run-on sentence. Why do they even let uneducated people write?" The reader is presented as a smug, self-appointed grammar expert. In the second panel, the camera zooms in to reveal the book they are reading is "The Sun Also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway.
The humor lies in the irony that the person is criticizing the writing quality of one of the most celebrated American novelists of the 20th century. Hemingway was famous for his distinctive minimalist prose style, which deliberately used run-on sentences, sentence fragments, and unconventional grammar as literary techniques. The reader'''s inability to recognize Hemingway'''s intentional stylistic choices as anything other than "errors" reveals them to be far less literate than they believe themselves to be.
The votey panel extends the joke further, with the same character exclaiming "Oh my God. Shakespeare misspelled EVERYTHING." This escalates the comedy by having the pedantic reader apply modern spelling standards to Early Modern English, completely unaware that spelling was not standardized in Shakespeare'''s era. The comic is a pointed satire of people who confuse rigid adherence to grammar rules with genuine literary knowledge or intelligence.