2014-06-22
Explanation
The Joke
A group of people who appear to be conjoined or stacked together approach a woman and say, "Hey, I hope this doesn't seem weird, but I and my siblings have aggregated into a single biological unit in order to increase the chance that one of us will mate with you tonight." The caption below reads: "I should never have dated in the slime mold lab."
The Humor
The comic applies the reproductive strategy of slime molds to human dating. Slime molds are organisms that can exist as individual single-celled creatures but under certain conditions aggregate into a single multicellular body to improve their chances of survival and reproduction. Here, a group of siblings has literally merged into one organism to improve their collective odds of mating — treating dating as a numbers game taken to its biological extreme. The caption reveals the woman works in a slime mold lab, explaining why her dating pool consists of people who behave like slime molds. The humor lies in the absurdity of applying a real biological strategy from simple organisms to human social behavior, and in the matter-of-fact way the aggregated siblings explain their strategy as if it were perfectly reasonable.
References
Slime molds (such as Dictyostelium discoideum) are real organisms that exhibit aggregation behavior. When food is scarce, individual amoeba-like cells release chemical signals that cause them to aggregate into a multicellular slug-like body, which can then form a fruiting body to disperse spores. This comic applies that biological concept humorously to human courtship.