flowers
Explanation
The Joke
The comic is set at the "Annual Flower-Fancier Get Together XXXVIII" (the 38th annual gathering). A woman at the event is admiring a man's shirt, noting "That's a real tight tulip-print shirt! Probably look like a prize-winning garden spread out on my hotel room floor." The caption below reads: "Every subculture is, at its core, a sex thing."
The Humor
The comic takes an utterly wholesome and innocent hobby -- flower appreciation -- and reveals that even the most G-rated interest group still functions as a venue for romantic and sexual connection. The woman's pickup line repurposes flower terminology as flirtation, using the imagery of a "prize-winning garden spread out on my hotel room floor" as a double entendre. The caption delivers the thesis statement with deadpan confidence: no matter how niche or innocent a hobby appears, when people who share a passion gather together, attraction and romance inevitably follow. The humor is in the universality of the observation and the choice of the most aggressively unsexy subculture possible (flower fanciers) to prove the point. The Roman numeral "XXXVIII" indicating this is the 38th such gathering also subtly reinforces that this has been going on for a very long time.