and-so
Explanation
This single-panel comic shows a robot narrator reading from a book to a group of human listeners. The robot is telling a romance story: "And so, for unlikely reasons, the human genome's mate was one who was 3 standard deviations more desirable than they had expected based on their physiological and socioeconomic characteristics."
The caption below reads: "The machines quickly dominated the romance novel market."
The joke is that an AI or robot, tasked with writing romance fiction, would reduce the core fantasy of the genre -- falling in love with someone "out of your league" -- to cold statistical language. Romance novels typically thrive on emotional language, passion, and fantasy, but the robot describes the same trope (an ordinary person ending up with an extraordinarily attractive partner) using the clinical vocabulary of statistics and genetics ("standard deviations," "genome," "physiological and socioeconomic characteristics").
The humor lies in the contrast between the deeply emotional genre of romance and the utterly dispassionate, data-driven way a machine would describe the same narrative beats. It also pokes fun at the formulaic nature of romance novels -- if the genre's appeal can be reduced to statistical improbability, maybe the machines really could replicate it. The idea that machines "dominated" this market implies readers actually enjoyed this sterile version, which adds another layer of absurdity.