eat-what-you-kill
Explanation
The Joke
A woman advocates the ethical position that people should only eat meat they have personally killed. Her companion points out practical problems — hunted meat costs more time and money than store-bought. The first woman then reveals she has invented a device: a small artificial brain that connects to dead meat, giving it a nervous system so it briefly "experiences life as a steak-with-a-brain." She then switches off the brain, "technically killing" the meat, which she then places on the grill. Her companion raises ethical objections about repeatedly bringing something to life just to kill it, but the inventor deflects by comparing it to human reproduction and arguing that statistically, any thinking brain is "probably a steak-with-a-brain," so objectors are likely "a delusional piece of beef." The companion decides to become a vegetarian, but the inventor reveals she is already attaching the brain device to her baked potato.
The Humor
The comic is a reductio ad absurdum of the "eat what you kill" ethical philosophy. Instead of accepting the straightforward moral argument about being closer to the consequences of meat consumption, the inventor finds an absurd technological loophole — creating life in the meat just so she can personally kill it. The joke escalates as each ethical objection is met with increasingly twisted logic, culminating in the statistical argument that because she has made so many steak-brains, any thinking being is more likely to be a steak than a human. The final gag — attaching the brain to a baked potato — shows there is no escaping this person's deranged commitment to her loophole, even if you go vegetarian. It satirizes both extreme ethical positions about food and the human tendency to find clever workarounds that technically satisfy a rule while completely violating its spirit.