A lady came up to me on the street and pointed at my suede jacket. "Did you know a cow was murdered for that jacket?" she sneered. I replied in a psychotic tone, "I didn't know there were any witnesses. Now I'll have to kill you too."

Johannsen’s joke riffs on a familiar street-level moral confrontation—being shamed for wearing leather—by escalating it into absurd, mock-violent melodrama. The humor comes from the sudden genre shift: a mundane ethical critique is treated as if it were evidence in a crime thriller, with the speaker adopting a “psychotic tone” and reframing the cow’s death as “murder” with “witnesses.” This inversion satirizes both sanctimony and defensiveness: it exposes how moral accusations can provoke exaggerated counterreactions, while also undercutting the speaker’s own position by making it cartoonishly extreme. The line relies on shock and incongruity rather than argument, using hyperbole to puncture self-righteousness.