stop-3
Explanation
This comic is about the frustration of being interrupted mid-sentence, escalating into a meta-joke about grammar and punctuation.
In the first panel, someone is telling a story and gets interrupted by another person yelling "STOP!" The interrupted speaker complains about being cut off, while the interrupter explains they always interrupt when someone is being boring. The comic then escalates: the interrupter points out that the speaker was not even grammatically correct -- they were using open quotation marks without closing them. The speaker protests, and a third party enters to complain that the parenthetical remark the speaker just started was never closed either.
The joke is a cascade of increasingly pedantic interruptions, each one meta-referencing the punctuation and grammar of the conversation itself. Every time someone objects to being interrupted, their objection introduces a new grammatical structure (a quotation, a parenthetical) that itself gets interrupted, creating an infinite regress of unclosed punctuation. The final "NOOOO" from the original speaker captures the despair of someone trapped in a recursive grammar nightmare. The humor is characteristic of SMBC's love of logical escalation and self-referential jokes about language.