holmes
Explanation
The Joke
The comic shows Sherlock Holmes making a classic Holmesian deduction: "The crucial clue was, in fact, an analysis of the handwriting on that card. You can tell much about a man's character from the character of his script." The caption below then reveals: "To date, Sherlock Holmes has sent 439 innocent men to the gallows."
The Humor
The joke punctures the mystique of Sherlock Holmes's famous deductive reasoning. Holmes's methods — graphology (handwriting analysis), reading character from physical appearance, making sweeping inferences from tiny clues — sound impressive in Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, but in reality would be considered pseudoscience. Graphology in particular has been widely debunked as a reliable method of character analysis. The punchline reveals the horrifying logical consequence: if Holmes is actually using junk science to solve murder cases, he would be convicting innocent people left and right. The number 439 is comically large, emphasizing just how much damage a confident detective wielding pseudoscience could do.
References
The comic references Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, in which Holmes frequently uses graphology and other questionable analytical methods presented as brilliant deduction. Graphology — the analysis of handwriting to determine personality traits — is considered a pseudoscience by the mainstream scientific community, with studies consistently failing to demonstrate its validity.