2012-06-15
Explanation
A man tells his partner he wanted to do something special for their anniversary. He explains that he assigned a numerical value to each genetic code letter (A, G, T, C mapped to 0, 1, 2, 3), then extrapolated that system to express all English-language characters. Using this encoding, he inserted their marriage vows into the genetic code of a cell from their cat, then cloned it -- so now this precious kitten has their love "written in each of its trillions of cells." The kitten promptly turns out to be a horrifying, screeching monster. In the final panel, he sheepishly adds "Also I got you flowers," and his partner replies "Flowers are nice."
The joke works on several levels. First, it satirizes the romantic-gesture-through-science trope, where a scientifically minded partner attempts an absurdly over-engineered expression of love that completely misses the point of romance. Second, there is the practical joke that inserting arbitrary text into a genome by encoding it as base-pair sequences would almost certainly produce a horribly mutated organism rather than a normal kitten -- the genetic code is functional, and randomly rewriting it to spell out wedding vows would disrupt essential genes. The punchline lands on the contrast between the grand romantic vision and the mundane reality: after all that effort (and the resulting monstrous cat), simple flowers would have been the better gift all along.