why the watchmen ligma balls joke is so funny: a thread

1. on the surface layer, there's the meme reference and the fact that Doctor Manhattan says "balls". but it goes waaay deeper

(for brevity, I abbreviate Doctor Manhattan, Rorschach and Steve Jobs as DM, RS, and SJ going forward)

2. Going a little deeper, we see the contrast between the third panel, where DM says the punchline, and the fourth panel, where he kills RS. this appears to be an absurdist non-sequitur

3. Additionally, the joke is "wrong"; RS didn't give the correct response but DM finished the joke anyway. This sits halfway between pure absurdism and the relatability; we've all experienced times where we've responded to what we expected someone to say and not what they said

4. But understanding the true depth of the joke requires some detail about the Watchmen lore. Watchmen is set in 1985, one year after the release of the Macintosh in our world. SJ was already famous in our world, but not yet dead.

If that were the case, that would itself be humorous, but because technology evolved very differently in the Watchmen universe, it's totally possible that SJ wasn't famous at all. So under that interpretation, DM's question becomes even more nonsensical

5. Deeper still, recall that DM is virtually omniscient, knowing the future of his timeline as well as others. It is not unreasonable to suggest that he knows of SJ, his death, and even the ligma joke, all from observing *our* universe

Thus his comment is entirely alien to RS, as befits DM's "inhuman" characterization.

6. But there's yet another, deeper layer of the joke. As I said, DM knows the future. That means he knows RS will ask who SJ is! It's not that DM was overeager to get to the punchline; he asked the question knowing RS won't get it, intending to say the punchline anyway

After this meaningless joke, he kills its only listener. For what purpose? Does he want to give RS a bit of humor as a mercy? Then why not give him time to appreciate the joke? Mockery? But DM doesn't harbor hard feelings to RS; he kills him out of necessity.

My analysis is that DM didn't have any motive for choosing to tell the joke; indeed, he didn't choose to tell the joke at all. Just as the picture on the page had no power over what the author wrote, the character of DM had no power over his joke.

"We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings."

this is the meme, for the uninitiated