splice
Explanation
The Joke
At a party, a woman says, "Thanks for having me to your party, it's nice to meet the English department." A man with glasses notices something suspicious about her speech: "I... the length of that pause you just made... did you comma splice that last sentence?" The woman, caught red-handed, panics and shouts, "There's no way for you to know!" The caption below reads: "I am no longer allowed within 100 meters of the Grammar Club."
The joke imagines a world where grammatical errors in speech are not only detectable but socially scandalous. A comma splice -- the error of joining two independent clauses with just a comma instead of a conjunction or semicolon -- is normally a written punctuation mistake. The comic absurdly extends this to spoken language, where the man can somehow "hear" the comma splice in the duration of her pause between clauses.
The Humor
The humor works on multiple levels. First, there is the absurdity of detecting punctuation in speech -- spoken language doesn't have commas, so the idea that someone could hear one is inherently ridiculous. Second, there is the social satire of grammar pedantry taken to an extreme: the man treats a comma splice like a crime, and the woman reacts with the desperate denial of someone caught in a deeply shameful act. The caption suggesting the narrator has been banned from the Grammar Club implies this sort of aggressive grammar-policing is a recurring behavior. The alt text ("Of course, in real life if you formed a grammar club, the only attendees would be linguists looking to talk shit") adds a meta-joke about how actual language experts (descriptive linguists) tend to mock prescriptive grammar rules rather than enforce them.