the-criterion-of-embarrassment
Explanation
This comic explains and then satirizes the "criterion of embarrassment," a real principle used in biblical scholarship. The criterion holds that if a passage in the Bible would have been embarrassing or inconvenient for the people who wrote it down, it is more likely to be historically true -- because why would they include something embarrassing unless it really happened? The example given is Mark 3:21, where Jesus's own family thinks he's crazy.
The comic then takes this principle to an absurd extreme: a character describes a scene from a book where "a guy gets burned to death, they lube him up like a fish at a party, he cheers of that guy's daughter before throwing his balls to a dog." The other character responds, "That's the truest story I've ever heard." The joke is that by the logic of the criterion of embarrassment, the more grotesque and embarrassing a story is, the more "true" it must be -- reducing an interesting scholarly heuristic to an absurdity.