2014-03-15
Explanation
The Joke
A man gives a monologue about how modern technology has made it possible to compress enormous amounts of information into tiny spaces, manufacture memory at molecular scales, and produce it cheaply. With all this capability, he announces that he has "created billions of copies" of something -- and it turns out to be his genome. He declares that "my genome is everywhere" -- in houses, in food, in every surface of the world. He triumphantly proclaims that human ecology is now "replete with my genome" and that his genome will remain long after mankind is no more. Then the comic cuts to "Earlier..." where someone asks him, "How are you so comfortable picking your nose all the time?" -- revealing that his grand technological vision of spreading his genome was really just a pretentious justification for his habit of picking his nose and wiping it on everything.
The Humor
The comic builds up an elaborate, impressive-sounding scientific monologue about nanotechnology, molecular manufacturing, and the permanence of genetic material. The reader is led to think the man is some kind of visionary scientist. The punchline completely deflates this by revealing that all of this was just an absurdly over-intellectualized excuse for a gross personal habit. The humor lies in the enormous gap between the grandiose framing and the mundane, disgusting reality. It also parodies the way some people use scientific language to rationalize or dignify behaviors that are simply off-putting. The man is technically correct that nose-picking does spread his DNA everywhere, which makes the justification even funnier in its perverse accuracy.