2014-04-25
Explanation
The Joke
A man sees a ghostly figure and asks, "Who are you?" The ghost replies, "Your ghost." The man protests, "I'm not dead yet! How can I have a ghost?" The ghost explains: in the future, time travel is invented, and the man's future ghost has traveled back to fix his teen years.
The ghost then reveals the backstory: as a teenager, the man was such a bad driver that he killed his future self. Future him becomes a ghost, finds teenage him really annoying, and waits until the teenager becomes an adult in the present to make contact.
The ghost proposes they go back in time together: the man must "arrange" his own death, build a time machine, and go kill teenage himself. The man objects: "But... if I kill him, we both cease to exist." The ghost says, "We will make him pay."
The specific embarrassing memory the ghost wants to avenge? "Remember when he asked a girl out through a KFC drive-thru window and he thought she said yes, but she was actually talking to the next customer about a farmhouse cole slaw?"
The Humor
The comic is a convoluted time-travel paradox played for laughs. The logical absurdities pile up: a ghost from the future travels back in time, both versions of the person want to kill their teenage self despite the obvious paradox that this would erase their own existence, and the motivation for this universe-destroying revenge is an incredibly petty teenage embarrassment at a KFC drive-thru.
The humor comes from the escalation -- the ghost and the man are both so mortified by their teenage awkwardness that they are willing to create a temporal paradox and cease to exist rather than live with the memory. It is a hyperbolic take on the universal feeling of cringing at your younger self.