2013-06-03
Explanation
This comic is titled "Cosmology Has Really Improved My Age Insults." A younger man cheerfully asks his elderly father, "Hey Dad! Remember when quark-gluon plasma condensed into matter?" The father, an old man sitting in an armchair wearing glasses and a hearing aid, responds bluntly with a profanity.
The joke is a play on the classic "youre so old" insult format. Instead of saying something like "remember when TV was invented," the son reaches all the way back to the very beginning of the universe -- the moment after the Big Bang when quark-gluon plasma cooled and condensed into the first protons and neutrons. This happened roughly 13.8 billion years ago, making it the ultimate "youre old" joke. The fathers angry response shows he gets the insult perfectly.
The votey shows the father with a tear in his eye, saying, "We lost a lotta good plasma back then." This extends the joke by having the father actually play along with the premise, acting as though he genuinely remembers the early universe and is nostalgic about the quark-gluon plasma era, in the style of a war veteran reminiscing about fallen comrades.