2011-02-03
Explanation
This comic, titled "The More Technology Humanity Creates, The Weirder You'''ll Be in Old Age," is a single-panel joke imagining a far-future scenario. An elderly man with white hair and glasses is telling a group of horrified-looking children, "In MY day, you inseminated a HUMAN FEMALE, and the baby developed INSIDE HER BODY." The words "my day," "human female," and "inside her body" are emphasized in bold/italics to stress how alien these concepts sound to the children.
The humor comes from imagining a future so technologically advanced that natural human reproduction -- something we currently consider completely normal -- has become an antiquated, disgusting curiosity. The old man is essentially the equivalent of today'''s grandparents telling kids about rotary phones or outhouses, except his "back in my day" story is about biological pregnancy itself. The children'''s appalled expressions suggest that to them, the idea of a baby growing inside a human body sounds as grotesque and primitive as, say, medieval surgery sounds to us. The comic cleverly points out that every generation'''s baseline normalcy becomes the next generation'''s incomprehensible weirdness, and this process will only accelerate as technology transforms increasingly fundamental aspects of human life.
The votey panel shows two children talking afterward. One asks, "Are you gonna delete Grampa'''s story from your brain too?" and the other replies, "What story?" -- implying that in this future, people have the ability to selectively delete memories, and the second child has already erased the traumatizing account of old-fashioned biological reproduction. This adds another layer of future technology (memory editing) while also serving as the comic'''s final punchline about how disturbing the children found the old man'''s story.