You've missed the joke, or maybe you weren't old enough to be learning Python during Java's heyday.

The joke is that people wanting to write Python like Java - with an implicit reference to an object's instance - would attempt to import Java's `this` keyword.

Instead of getting Java-like behavior, they're presented with the Zen of Python. You wouldn't be wrong to think that it was as much a commentary on other popular languages of the day as it was a guiding ethos of Python itself.

"Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit."

The call to import this has more than the Python syntax meaning.