With this audience, that joke just fell flat and stayed there for all time.

The joke was so bad that it never even stood up, it just is and always has been dead.

It is interesting to see what's happening around this pattern, so I won't be too sure that it was indeed a joke.

I don’t think it is for this discussion. You could put any pattern around it that doesn’t soon destroy this pattern (I would pick one that eventually destroys it. That takes away any possible misunderstanding about this pattern being indestructible)

Also, I think there’s no animation that shows the special property of this pattern.

Yes, you could show a grid with all other possible 30 × 24 cell grids, iterate over one iteration, and then show none of them evolves to the given pattern, but that grid would be way, way, way, too large (and that’s an under-, under-, understatement) for that to pop out (that’s a scientific term. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_search#Feature_search) to our visual system.

It's missing an "/s" at the end to make it passable