I recall when I was a wee little shaver everywhere in Brookfield Zoo was a plastic wombat and a sign saying “Save the Wombat” and you could put money in the plastic wombat to save the real life ones. I always gave money to save the poor critter. 
I’m not the one you were waiting for, and besides, he’s already been here. But I’ll hand out my $.02 even so as to one possible contributing factor. Having spent most of my working life in IT it’s a major reason why wombats are funny to me, at least.
Back when the Earth’s crust was still solidifying, and we used DEC-VAX systems, crudely chipped out of flint–and we liked it!–they came with this horrible DBMS called Datatrieve. In the “help” menu of Datatrieve there was an entry for Wombat, which when selected provided a fancifully humorous article on the wombat. It was full of cute details like Lewis Carroll having had a pet wombat which slept in an epergne. (What was an epergne? Clearly someplace where a wombat could sleep). There was a lot more in that general vein. So the two things I got out of the years of working with DEC-VAX and Datatrieve was that (1) Datatrieve is the worst of the worst, and (2) the happy memories of the wombat story.
That did it for me. I should have thought of a wombat name myself when I joined.
You have money, brains, and time? How the hell did you get through our screening process?
[Jedi hand wave] This is not the mod you’re looking for.
I believe they were chipped out of rock. By a grue. I remember playing Zork on a Vax - it was somewhat of an improvement from playing Colossal Cave Adventure on a DEC-20.
Epergne. They really aren’t that comfy.
Well, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad.