2014-01-05
Explanation
The Joke
A person says that whenever they are happy, they want more of everything. They wish there were a unit of measurement that describes a large amount numerically but a small amount when you are really excited. In the final panel, a woman at a bar yells: "Barkeep! One googol's worth of vodka, please!"
The Humor
The joke plays with the idea of scale and perception. The setup establishes a relatable observation: when you are happy or excited, you want more of everything. The person wishes for a unit that sounds impressively large as a number but is actually a tiny physical quantity when you are enthusiastic. The punchline delivers this with "googol" -- a googol is the number 10^100, which sounds enormous. But if you ordered a googol of something measured in an absurdly small unit (like molecules or Planck volumes), it could still be a very small amount of actual vodka. The humor lies in the absurd image of someone excitedly ordering what sounds like an impossibly large quantity of alcohol, combined with the nerd-humor of using mathematical terminology at a bar. The joke also works because it pokes fun at how excitement makes us want to use grandiose language even for simple pleasures.
References
A googol is the number 10^100 (1 followed by 100 zeros), a term coined by mathematician Edward Kasner in 1920. It is an astronomically large number but, depending on the unit of measurement, could represent a very small physical quantity.