2013-11-16
Explanation
The Joke
A group of girls are playing the party game "Never Have I Ever." The rules are explained: you say something you have never done, and everyone who has done it raises their hand. One red-haired girl goes first and says: "Never have I ever kept my hand down in response to this question."
This creates a logical paradox. If you have never kept your hand down (meaning you always raised your hand), you should keep your hand down now because you are truthfully saying you have never done that. But by keeping your hand down, you are now doing the thing you claimed never to have done -- which means you should raise your hand. The result is an explosion (literally depicted in the comic), and the final panel shows the red-haired girl staring with fire reflected in her eyes, having weaponized the game into a self-referential paradox.
The Humor
The comic takes a simple party game and turns it into a version of the liar's paradox (similar to "this statement is false"). The humor comes from the escalation: what starts as an innocent social game is destroyed by someone clever enough to find the logical exploit. The dramatic explosion and the girl's menacing expression in the final panel treat the paradox as if it has literally broken reality, satirizing the way self-referential paradoxes seem to "break" logical systems.
References
The paradox is structurally similar to Russell's Paradox (does the set of all sets that do not contain themselves contain itself?) and the classical Liar's Paradox ("this statement is false"). The game "Never Have I Ever" is a well-known party/drinking game.