heart
Explanation
The comic is a multi-panel strip about heart surgery with an unexpected twist.
In the first panel, a patient asks their doctor: "Doc, ever since that new kind of surgery on the heart, has anything strange happened on the table?" The doctor replies: "When we took out your old heart, we transplanted in the heart of a criminal."
The patient then asks: "Blue collar or white collar?" The doctor responds: "White collar." The patient immediately says: "Pardon me, but I must send an email."
The final panel shows a newspaper headline: "Biotech company bankrupt after side effects of heart surgery trial. Investor makes millions shorting stock."
The joke plays on the horror/sci-fi trope of organ transplants transferring the personality traits of the donor to the recipient, most famously seen in stories about recipients of criminals' hearts who begin exhibiting criminal tendencies. However, instead of the expected trope of a violent criminal's heart causing violent behavior, the comic subverts expectations: the transplanted heart came from a white-collar criminal, and so the patient immediately begins engaging in white-collar crime, specifically insider trading or stock market fraud. The patient, upon learning the biotech company's surgery has side effects, immediately moves to short the company's stock before the news becomes public, which is a form of securities fraud.
The distinction between "blue collar" and "white collar" crime is central to the joke. The patient asks which type of criminal the heart came from, not out of fear, but seemingly to calibrate what kind of criminal behavior they will now exhibit. The humor comes from the specificity and banality of white-collar crime compared to the dramatic violent crimes usually depicted in transplant horror stories.
The comic also contains an implicit satire of how white-collar crime, despite causing enormous financial damage, is often treated as less serious or even clever, compared to street crime.