humpty-dumpty
Explanation
The Joke
The comic retells the nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty" with a dark twist. The first two panels follow the familiar rhyme: "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall." But in the second panel, Humpty Dumpty is shown screaming as he falls, clearly terrified rather than simply toppling accidentally.
The third panel shows the king's horses and the king's men arriving at the scene. But instead of the traditional ending where they "couldn't put Humpty together again," the final panel reveals a sinister truth: the king's horses and men "felt the sentient egg should never have been." They stand over Humpty's shattered remains, and one soldier says, "We did right to push it. We did what was right." Another adds, "We are safe now." The "great fall" was not an accident -- it was a deliberate murder, carried out because the king's men found the existence of a sentient egg to be an abomination.
The Humor
The comic takes an innocent children's nursery rhyme and reimagines it as a horror story about existential fear and mob violence. The traditional rhyme never explains why all the king's horses and all the king's men were dispatched to deal with a broken egg -- it seems like an absurd overreaction. This comic provides a darkly logical answer: they were not there to help; they were the ones who pushed him. The humor is black comedy, derived from the soldiers' self-righteous justification of murdering Humpty Dumpty because a sentient egg "should never have been." Their relieved "We are safe now" implies they viewed this egg-person as some kind of existential threat, which is both absurd and eerily reminiscent of real-world persecution of those who are seen as different or unnatural.
References
The comic is based on the English nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty," which dates back to at least 1797. The original rhyme never actually states that Humpty Dumpty is an egg -- that association comes from Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass" (1871) and subsequent illustrations. The original rhyme may have referred to a cannon during the English Civil War, though this origin is debated by scholars.