scripted
Explanation
The Joke
A couple is watching sports on TV. The announcer exclaims, "Oh! Took him down hard! That's gotta hurt!" The man on the couch says dismissively, "I don't see how you enjoy this stuff. It's all scripted in advance." The caption below reads: "Determinists hate sports."
The comic applies the common complaint about professional wrestling -- that it is "scripted" and therefore not worth watching -- to all sports, through the lens of philosophical determinism. A determinist believes that every event is causally predetermined by prior events and natural laws, meaning the outcome of every game was effectively "scripted" by the initial conditions of the universe.
The Humor
The humor comes from the clever equivocation on the word "scripted." When people say wrestling is scripted, they mean humans deliberately planned the outcome. When a determinist says sports are scripted, they mean the laws of physics predetermined every play, every fumble, and every score from the moment of the Big Bang. The joke works because the complaint sounds identical in both cases, but the philosophical implications are wildly different. It is also funny because it takes an abstract philosophical position (determinism) and shows its absurd practical consequence: you could never enjoy watching any competitive event if you truly believed the outcome was already determined.
References
Determinism is the philosophical view that all events, including human decisions and actions, are ultimately determined by previously existing causes. Hard determinists argue that free will is an illusion and that every event in the universe follows inevitably from prior states according to natural laws. This view has been debated by philosophers from the ancient Stoics through Laplace, and remains a live issue in philosophy of mind and physics.