2011-10-01
Explanation
This two-panel comic makes a joke about the inevitability of crude humor in science. The first panel is captioned "September 1981: The first scanning tunneling microscope is created" and shows the microscope itself -- a significant scientific achievement that would earn its inventors the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. The second panel is captioned "September 1981 + 1 second: The first scanning tunneling microscope joke is created" and shows a younger scientist turning to an older colleague (presumably one of the inventors) and saying, "Hey Heinrich! We found your penis!"
The joke is that it took exactly one second after the creation of an incredibly powerful microscope -- capable of imaging individual atoms -- for someone to make the obvious joke that you would need such extreme magnification to find a colleague'''s genitalia. The comic comments on the universal and immediate nature of juvenile humor: no matter how momentous the scientific achievement, someone will instantly find a way to make a crude joke about it.
The votey panel extends this with a graph showing "Insultingness of '''We Found Your Penis''' Jokes" on the Y-axis versus "Microscope Magnification" on the X-axis, with a positive linear relationship. The implication is that the more powerful the microscope needed to "find" the penis, the more insulting the joke becomes -- and scanning tunneling microscopes, which operate at the atomic scale, represent a particularly devastating burn.