Nine drafts of a four word joke

The first version had fourteen words and explained itself twice. The ninth has four and explains nothing. Everything between those two drafts was subtraction.

A statement on a shirt is read at distance, sideways, in a queue, by someone who did not choose to read it. It has no second sentence to lean on. Whatever qualification you were planning to add has to survive inside the words already there, or it does not survive.

What we cut, in order: the setup, the second clause, the adverb, the joke about the joke, and finally the word that made it obvious. What was left still lands — and now it lands a beat later, which is the whole point.