2013-02-16
Explanation
This comic features an older man (resembling a cheerful scientist or professor) talking to a young child. The child says "I wish there were puppies all over the place!" The man responds enthusiastically: "But don'''t you see? With science... there ARE!" He then explains that dogs are mostly made of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and hydrogen, and that air is made of the same stuff. Because atoms are physically indistinct -- meaning there is no difference between a carbon atom in a dog and a carbon atom in air -- he concludes that dogs are everywhere: above you, behind you, in the day, in the night, on the ceiling, under the bed. He goes further: "Every time you eat, you'''re eating a puppy! Every time you breathe, you'''re inhaling a puppy."
The child responds "That'''s horrifying," to which the man cheerfully says "Hey, don'''t thank me. Thank SCIENCE." When the child clarifies "I didn'''t thank you," the man declares "Sound waves are also interchangeable!" -- applying the same flawed logic to sound itself, implying that the words "that'''s horrifying" and "thank you" are equivalent because they are both just sound waves.
The joke satirizes a particular style of pop-science enthusiasm where technically true but meaningless facts are presented as profound revelations. While it is technically true that the same types of atoms make up both dogs and air, saying "therefore you are breathing puppies" is an absurd category error. The comic mocks the kind of reductive scientism that strips all meaning from concepts by reducing everything to its most basic components. The votey panel shows the child saying an expletive to his dad, and the dad responding "I love you too!" -- continuing the joke about interchangeable meanings.