I also don’t get it. Not everything that smells causes you to sneeze. None of the methods actually make sense. A feather tickles you, not makes you sneeze. And the pepper? The experiment is invalid. Did not disprove the hypothesis, needs more testing.
I read it as a joke of increasing absurdity. Sniffing pepper makes people sneeze so that one works (besides the trying to make a plant sneeze part). He got a bit distracted by experiment 2 and mixed up the involuntary reactions sneezing and tickling and tries to tickle it with a feather. He then gets further distracted between experiment 2 and 3, and tests feet which are commonly ticklish.
When I break it down like this you can see that it is a very funny joke, as one can always tell from a detailed explanation of the joke.
Something tells me that you don’t work in science. The process for getting science funding isn’t simple and weeds out useless studies pretty quickly. On average, calls for proposals have about a 15% success rate. So, 15 in every 100 proposals get funded. They are funded after being vetted for usefulness, feasibility, novelty, cost, and other factors.
Since studies are well-vetted before getting funded, studies that sound like they’re simple or useless based on headlines normally make a lot of sense when you read the research results.
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