2012-08-26
Explanation
This comic plays on the common medical trope of a doctor delivering a frightening diagnosis. A doctor tells her patient, "I'''m afraid you have Dickfallsoff virus," to which the alarmed patient responds, "WHAT?!" The doctor then reassures him by explaining, "Oh, ha, don'''t worry. It'''s named after its discoverer." The patient visibly relaxes and says, "Thank God!" But the doctor immediately follows up with the deadpan correction: "It'''s actually a bacteria."
The humor operates on a classic misdirection. The patient'''s relief comes from learning the disease is named after its discoverer (Dr. Dickfallsoff, presumably), not from the disease being harmless. The doctor'''s final line pulls the rug out from under this relief -- the "correction" that it'''s a bacteria rather than a virus is medically pedantic and completely beside the point, yet she delivers it as if clarifying the taxonomy is the important thing. The joke leaves ambiguous whether the name is descriptive after all or just unfortunately named, which adds to the comedy.
In the votey (bonus panel), Zach Weinersmith breaks the fourth wall with the cartoonist character saying "The joke is penis" while a woman (presumably his wife) replies "Yeah, I got it." This is a self-aware meta-commentary acknowledging the lowbrow nature of the main comic'''s punchline while poking fun at the cartoonist'''s own tendency toward anatomical humor.