date-2
Explanation
The Joke
A group of people from different countries are arguing about date formats. An American complains about how other countries write dates as "day/month/year" (DD/MM/YYYY), calling it illogical. A European fires back that the American format (MM/DD/YYYY) is worse because it doesn't go "from the most to least significant" digit. An Asian person mentions the ISO 8601 format (YYYY/MM/DD), going from largest to smallest unit, which is arguably the most logical. Someone else proposes writing the second digit of the year first, then the first digit of the month, then the second digit of the month — an absurdly scrambled format. When asked "By the way, what's the date?" the person replies with a completely nonsensical date string, and is told to stop. The final panel has someone wishing "Happy New Year," grounding the comic in the context of New Year's celebrations where dates matter.
The Humor
The comic satirizes the perennial international debate about date formats. It starts with the real-world controversy (Americans use MM/DD/YYYY while most of the world uses DD/MM/YYYY, and programmers advocate for YYYY-MM-DD / ISO 8601), then escalates into absurdity by having someone propose an intentionally chaotic format that scrambles individual digits from the date components. The humor builds through escalation — each suggestion is more or less defensible until someone proposes a system so convoluted it's clear the entire argument has become absurd. The punchline is the New Year's context, where this petty formatting war happens at the exact moment when how you write the date actually matters.
Context
The date format debate is a genuine source of international confusion and occasional internet arguments. ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) is the international standard favored by programmers and data scientists. The comic was published around January 1, making the New Year's timing particularly apt.