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Explanation
The Joke
An alien named Zordrak is speaking to a human woman, trying to explain something delicately. He says: "Let me try to explain. Imagine there's a confused, angry monkey who is rapidly amassing a vast assortment of powerful explosives. He looks out the window every day and sees nobody stopping by to chat with him. In fact, he sees nobody in the entire neighborhood." He then asks, "Should the monkey find this strange?" The caption reads: 'Zordrak resolves the Fermi "Paradox."'
The Humor
The Fermi Paradox asks: if the universe is so vast and old that intelligent life should be common, why have we never detected any signs of it? The comic offers a darkly funny resolution: the reason aliens are not visiting Earth is the same reason neighbors avoid a dangerous, unstable person who is stockpiling weapons. Humanity is the "confused, angry monkey" amassing nuclear arsenals, and other civilizations are deliberately staying away because we are obviously dangerous and erratic. The alien puts "Paradox" in quotes because, from his perspective, there is no paradox at all -- the answer is blindingly obvious to everyone except the monkey. The humor is both in the unflattering-but-apt metaphor for humanity and in the realization that what we perceive as cosmic silence might simply be the rest of the galaxy giving us a very wide berth.
References
- The Fermi Paradox, attributed to physicist Enrico Fermi (1950), poses the question of why, given the high probability of extraterrestrial civilizations, we have found no evidence of them.
- The comic presents a variation of the "zoo hypothesis" or "dark forest" solutions to the Fermi Paradox, which suggest that advanced civilizations may be deliberately avoiding contact with humanity.