good-genes
Explanation
The Joke
A woman tells a man: "It's not fair, Gil. You got all the good genes in the family." In the second panel, she qualifies this: "Oh, that isn't true. You made a lot of people happy working as a zoo ranger." But in the third panel, it is revealed that Gil's gifts go far beyond normal human capabilities: "But Gil can absorb ambient energy and use it to perform quantum computations about the state of the cosmos." The final panel delivers the punchline, with the woman saying to the man: "But you've done very well for yourself."
The Humor
The comic starts with what seems like a typical sibling conversation about one person getting "the good genes" -- normally referring to things like looks, intelligence, or athleticism. The joke escalates the concept to an absurd extreme: Gil doesn't just have better looks or smarts; he can literally absorb ambient energy and perform quantum computations about the cosmos. This makes the sister's consolation ("you made a lot of people happy as a zoo ranger") hilariously inadequate by comparison. The final panel's patronizing "but you've done very well for yourself" is the kind of thing someone says to soften an enormous gap in achievement, and the cosmic scale of that gap makes the polite understatement extremely funny.