2010-01-18
Explanation
This comic imagines a university forced to combine its medical school with its track and field club due to budget cuts. In the first panel, an administrator announces the merger to a crowd of students, and one student responds with "Oh, dear God no." The premise sets up an expectation of disaster -- the idea of athletes and medical students sharing facilities seems like a recipe for chaos.
The second panel subverts this expectation. Instead of things going poorly, one student declares "Nevermind. This is awesome." The scene shows a track athlete hurdling over cadavers on medical examination tables while students watch, combining the two disciplines in a way that is simultaneously horrifying and entertaining. The joke plays on the dark humor of medical school culture and the unexpected visual comedy of athletic events being performed over medical equipment and specimens.
The votey panel delivers the inevitable dark punchline. A medical student asks "Where's my dissection head?" while a track coach asks "Where are all the shotputters?" and someone in the middle says "Oh no" -- implying that the shotputters used the dissection heads as shot puts. This takes the absurd premise to its logical and gruesome conclusion, suggesting that combining these two departments had exactly the kind of horrific consequences one would expect, just in a way nobody anticipated.