A friend sent me a Digg URL ending in APT_GET_WIFE_pic.
The email said the first comment explained what was in the comic. The comic itself was not copied into the message, so the URL and that one sentence carried almost all of it.
apt-get was the command used to install software on Debian-based Linux systems. Put a package name after it and the machine would try to find the package, download it, and install what it needed. Replace the package name with "wife" and you had exactly the level of joke that could travel around a group of systems people in 2008.
The entire message was a sentence, a link, and an AVG antivirus footer.
This was a few months after I had opened support tickets to get YUM working on a new VPS. YUM did the same general job for a different part of the Linux world. I had solved that installation before support got back to me. Package managers were useful enough to run servers and familiar enough to become jokes.
The message did not describe the drawing, name its creator, or include an image attachment. I could read the command in the URL, but I could not safely fill in the rest of the joke from that alone.
I had not replied in the thread. There was no reaction, explanation, or follow-up from me. The title was the only part that translated without the picture.
Ask a Debian-based machine to get a package named wife. Whether that package existed was the joke.