It's hilarious! I fed it the famous Portal 2 quote:
When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!
And this is what I got:
And, like you, the person who hears this is going to assume that it’s meant to be funny or satirical, and they’re going to be pretty impressed with the ingenuity of the joke. Unfortunately for that person, though, this joke is about a real, real thing, and it’s just not all that funny.
The joke is that there’s a thing called the “lemon gene,” and, basically, if you’re born with that gene, you have a certain predisposition to have lemons thrown at your face by your grandfather.
It’s not entirely clear from the original source, but the name of the gene comes from an old story, which in turn is derived from an anecdote from the movie, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” The original source is a series of articles that were published in Science Daily and the Telegraph, and they all say the same thing, so it’s probably safe to assume that this is the one that started the thing, and it’s basically a variation of the joke.
Basically, a famous African American comedian, who is known for delivering punch lines like “My father taught me many things, but you were not one of them.” got cancer at age 29. He’s now in his mid 60s, and you can see in this video that he’s still delivering the same joke. He’s delivered it over the course of his entire adult life, and, as you can see, it’s pretty clear that he’s not joking.
So, okay, it’s a real thing that happens, that a few people are born with, that makes them particularly susceptible to lemons. And what’s the effect of that, other than, perhaps, making life look a little less funny when someone throws a lemon at your face? The original claim from the article is that it can make someone more sensitive to pain and have more bad luck in life, but the original sources of that claim aren’t all that reliable and aren’t all that scientific.
The first source, for example, only talks about how it can “make you more conscious of the effect of the fruit,” and nothing at all about being more sensitive to pain. I guess, if you’re more conscious of the effect of the fruit and you’re also more likely to avoid it, that would make it seem like it could increase your sensitivity to pain.
But, as a matter of basic logic, it would be a lot more likely to make someone more likely to develop lemons, since someone’s more likely to get struck by a lemon when they’re not looking at it, than someone to get struck by a lemon just because someone else is throwing it at them. If someone’s more likely to get struck by a lemon, that would actually increase the likelihood that they’d then develop the “lemon gene.”
The second source is more informative, but there are still questions about it. They claim that if you’re born with the gene, your immune system can’t recognize lemons, and that if you eat an orange, your immune system can recognize the orange as an orange, but if you eat a lemon, it doesn’t know it’s a lemon and you get an attack of celiac disease.
In other words, lemons don’t attack you as lemons. They attack you as “potatoes with lemons on them.” Which is a pretty funny thing to say when you’re an adult. If you’re an adult, you know how to eat a potato. You know that it has to be cooked and you know that you can’t eat it raw. You know what it tastes like and how it’s supposed to look.
It’s hard to see how anyone would not know that lemons have some form of intrinsic danger in them, but it doesn’t seem like anyone knows that lemons themselves will start attacking you when you eat them. So, first of all, I doubt that that’s the real reason they have celiac disease. I think they have it because they eat too many potatoes with lemons on them.
It’s pretty clear from the original source that it’s not a very scientific explanation. One of the references to it comes from a doctor, who is describing a person who has had the disease since birth, and the doctor doesn’t even mention that they could be genetically pre-disposed to it.
Another one comes from a study done with mice, which has nothing to do with humans, and, again, they just look at the effects of being genetically predisposed to eating the lemons. They don’t test how likely you are to develop the disease. They don’t show you videos of people eating lemons.
They just show you mice eating lemons, and they talk about why that’s a good model for people. What they’re looking for is for people to have a greater amount of the protein that’s associated with lemons, because, according to them, that’s what happens if you eat the lemons.