2015-01-17
Explanation
The Joke
A coworker questions why someone brings their baby to work. The parent responds with an analogy: "You know how we lost that one barely-subcritical piece of uranium?" The coworker identifies it as "the one covered in spikes." The parent says to watch and puts the baby down for a moment — sure enough, the baby immediately finds the dangerous object and puts it in its mouth, prompting the parent to shout "Hey! Get that out of your mouth!"
The Humor
The comic plays on the well-known tendency of babies and toddlers to put absolutely everything in their mouths, no matter how dangerous or inappropriate. The parent has weaponized this behavior, essentially using the baby as a detection device for hazardous materials that the workplace has lost track of — in this case, a barely-subcritical piece of uranium covered in spikes.
The humor comes from the absurd juxtaposition: a workplace so dangerous that it casually loses pieces of uranium, and a parenting strategy so unorthodox that it uses an infant as a hazmat detector. The comic also satirizes workplaces with lax safety standards by making the environment so casually perilous that a baby finding radioactive material in seconds is treated as a useful feature rather than an emergency.