Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

joke-2

2023-05-02 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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joke-2
Votey panel for joke-2
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Explanation

In this comic, one character asks another, "Hey did you hear the joke about the man who was beaten to death, bare knuckle, by a hundred men who took turns pummeling him one at a time?" The other person says "No." The first character then says, "That wasn't a joke. It was just upsetting." The other responds: "Guess you didn't like the punchline!"

The humor operates on multiple levels. First, the setup subverts the "have you heard the joke about..." format by delivering something that is not a joke at all, but a disturbing description of violence. When the speaker clarifies "that wasn't a joke, it was just upsetting," the listener's response -- "Guess you didn't like the punchline!" -- is itself a dark pun. "Punchline" normally refers to the climactic funny part of a joke, but here it literally refers to a "line" (queue) of people "punching" someone to death. The comic is a meta-joke about the structure of jokes themselves, and about how wordplay can find humor even in deliberately unfunny material.

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