Scientists have located the gene that causes alcoholism. They found it at a party talking too loudly.

O’Brien’s joke satirizes the tendency to explain complex human behaviors through simple genetic determinism. By imagining a “gene” behaving like a loud, tipsy partygoer, he personifies biology and collapses scientific language into everyday social observation. The humor comes from the mismatch between the seriousness of genetic research and the familiar stereotype of alcoholism as visible, socially disruptive behavior. Implicitly, the line also pokes fun at media headlines that overstate scientific findings (“the gene for X”), suggesting that such claims can be as simplistic as identifying the loudest person at a party.