I guess I’m missing something. What’s the gag?
There’s a joke among Star Trek fans that the crewmen wearing red shirts are always the ones that get killed. Or in this case, the cookies wearing red shirts get eaten.
In the original Star Trek series members of the crew wearing red shirts had a very low life expectancy. They were usually the only ones to die on away missions.
ETA: beaten to the punch by slow typing!
Whenever there was an away team on the original series of Star Trek, and it was all the main characters and one random guy…he would be wearing a red shirt, and he would be the one who would get killed.
“Red shirt” has become synonymous with “the guy who’s going to die”. The cookies are all going to be eaten, therefore they are all going to die, therefore they have red shirts.
I recommend watching Galaxy Quest if you feel the need to do further research on this topic.
When my daughter was four, she saw her first Star Trek (original series) episode.
In the middle of it, she turned to me and asked, “Why all the red people fall down?”
And the REAL punchline is, of course, that he not only could be, but IS, a bigger geek than that because he made the doomed cookies red shirts.
We always referred to the guy in the red shirt as the ECM, or “Expendable Crew Member”"
Funny, cause each of the 4 members of my family individually commented that that was the funniest strip in Sunday’s paper! We corrupted them young… 
Thanks for the explanation folks. It now makes perfect sense to me.
I never watched much Star Trek, so this strip didn’t make much sense to me.
I did see the recent Star Trek movie, which I really liked. And I recall seeing an episode of Star Trek where Kirk & Spock go back in time and stay at a mission run by a pacifist woman who has to die or else Hitler wins the war. That was pretty good.
Other than that nobody would ever call me a Trekkie.
If you ever watch the movie again, watch for the “red shirt” in the sequence where Kirk, Sulu, and a third random crew member we haven’t seen before skydive down toward the drilling platform so they can blow it up. All of us Trek fans in the audience knew as soon as he showed up that he was doomed.
City on the Edge of Forever. The woman was Joan Collins.
It’s unfortunate that that’s one of the few you saw because it’s fairly uniformly considered one of the best of the original <70 episodes. 
Some of the others might seem pretty pale by comparison if that was the litmus.
Still, if you get a chance, there are a few others you might also like. Try The Squire of Gothos on for size and see if you dig it
Also, Balance of Terror, Starfleet’s first look at Romulans.
And The Enterprise incident. Another espionage story with Romulans.
And The Corbomite Maneuver. Featuring Ron Howard’s bro. But it’s still a good one.
Not to mention The Trouble with Tribbles.
And both Harry Mudd episodes.
He wasn’t exactly random–he was the Chief Engineer.
And he was carrying the explosives…
See my researched project: “Star Trek Death”.
Note: We have a member here called Der Trihs.
Just a note, the reason the red shirts died at such a prodigious rate compared to the blue and gold is the fact that the colours represented which division they were in.
Gold was command.
Blue was science and medical.
Red was ‘ops’ - that is to say, everybody else. Including security, and engineering (who got dinged disproportionately, too, if I remember correctly).
Obviously, since the security guys will be put into harms way more than anyone except the core cast (who aren’t going to die, usuakky), they die a lot. Often en masse.
Funnily enough, if Memory Alpha’s count is correct, TNG continued the tradition of disproportionate red shirt deaths, despite swapping ops and command colours, as they seem to have killed off the flight commanders (a command position) more often than anyone.