CONTEXT: I am involved in consulting and marketing for a petroleum industry invention [with applications in many other industries and laboratories] and created the following cartoon for brochures, webpages, advertisements, etc.
I asked Gemini Advanced to explain the above joke and it provided an excellent answer:
The joke plays on the surprising discovery of baby oil instead of crude oil during drilling operations. Here’s why it’s funny:
- Unexpected Substance: Petroleum engineers expect to find crude oil, a valuable resource. Finding baby oil is completely unexpected and absurd.
- Worthless Find: Unlike crude oil, baby oil has little value in the context of oil drilling. It’s a cheap product, often found in dollar stores.
- Technical Jargon: The use of technical terms like “spectrophotometer” and “Goblet Viscometer™” adds a layer of humor by contrasting the sophisticated equipment with the mundane discovery.
- Bathos: The joke creates a sense of bathos, or anticlimax, by building up expectations of a significant find and then revealing something trivial.
Essentially, the humor lies in the incongruity between the serious setting of an oil drilling operation and the unexpected, low-value discovery of baby oil. It’s like searching for gold and finding a bottle of shampoo!
Considering that plenty of people outside the oil industry wouldn’t get the joke at all, I thought this was quite impressive.
I’ve been getting in the habit of referring friends and colleagues around the world to A.I. when they ask me to explain some peculiarity of American English, pop-culture, or humor which they don’t understand. (I’m lazy and already do a lot of writing. So A.I. is helping with the correspondence load—and those people respond with what is essentially “Thank you for teaching me how to fish instead of just emailing me a fish.”)