15. Earth Humour

Notes

• 15.2

  From the equipment on the table, Swooth and Hamlet appear to be playing cribbage.

• 15.3

  People remember Spock being bemused at humans’ ‘little jokes’, but fact he has little trouble decoding human idioms. Swooth and Hamlet have apparently received some education in how to unpick Earthling banter, and are indulging in a mock-serious discussion—which is quite hard to fit in to these little panels.

  Update (2013). Only a few years later, and this strip has been rendered obsolete by advances in the real world. When I wrote this, same-sex marriage was science fiction; today it is mainstream and in a few years might be mundane. My idea in 2007 was that most alien cultures get summarized in a couple of sentences in Trek, and presumably aliens get a two-sentence summary of human society. In TV and movie Trek it was plain that the party line was that humans form male–female pairs, and they make more of a fuss about this than some nonhumans would feel was necessary. But a Star Trek that was the future of 2015 would be quite different from the Trek that is the future of 1965.