2014-12-25
Explanation
The Joke
Jesus is told that civilization is about to be destroyed and only a few will survive. He is given the chance to transmit exactly one sentence to the future. His solution is to give them "a sentence made up of all knowledge, separated by semicolons." Later, when future people find the message, one of them notes that "technically, every sentence is in there somewhere" -- implying Jesus crammed an impossibly long run-on sentence together using semicolons, technically fulfilling the "one sentence" constraint while violating its spirit entirely.
The Humor
The joke plays on the grammatical technicality that semicolons join independent clauses into a single sentence. By chaining every piece of human knowledge together with semicolons, Jesus exploits a loophole: it is technically one sentence, but it contains unlimited information. The humor is in the cleverness of the hack and the absurdity of treating a desperate last-chance scenario as a grammar puzzle. It also pokes fun at the semicolon itself as a punctuation mark that many people find confusing or pretentious -- here elevated to civilization-saving importance.