Sure. You have to solve it from inside out:

• not()…See comment below for this one, I was tricked is a base function that negates what’s inside (turning True to False and vice versa) giving it no parameter returns “True” (because no parameter counts as False)
• str(x) turns x into a string, in this case it turns the boolean True into the text string ‘True’
• min(x) returns the minimal element of an iterable. In this case the character ‘T’ because capital letters come before non-capital letters, otherwise it would return ‘e’ (I’m not entirely sure if it uses unicode, ascii or something else to compare characters, but usually capitals have a lower value than non-capitals and otherwise in alphabetical order ascending)
• ord(x) returns the unicode number of x, in this case turning ‘T’ into the integer 84
• range(x) creates an iterable from 0 to x (non-inclusive), in this case you can think of it as the list [0, 1, 2, …82, 83] (it’s technically an object of type range but details…)
• sum(x) sums up all elements of a list, summing all numbers between 0 and 84 (non-inclusive) is 3486
• chr(x) is the inverse of ord(x) and returns the character at position x, which, you guessed it, is ‘ඞ’ at position 3486.

The huge coincidental part is that ඞ lies at a position that can be reached by a cumulative sum of integers between 0 and a given integer. From there on it’s only a question of finding a way to feed that integer into chr(sum(range(x)))

Source

I think the humor is meant to be in the juxtaposition between “reference” in media contexts (e.g. “I am your father”) and “reference” in programming contexts and applying the latter context to the former one.

What does “I’m your father” mean if the movie is jaws?

I think the absurdity of that question is part of said humor. That being said, I didn’t find it funny either.

I’m not really sure how to describe it other than when I read a function to determine what it does then go to the next part of the code I’ve already forgotten how the function transforms the data

This sounds to me like you could benefit from mentally using the information hiding principle for your functions. In other words: Outside of the function, the only thing that matters is “what goes in?” and “what comes out?”. The implementation details should not be important once you’re working on code outside of that function.

To achieve this, maybe you could write a short comment right at the start of every function. One to two sentences detailing only the inputs/output of that function. e.g. “Accepts an image and a color and returns a mask that shows where that color is present.” if you later forget what the function does, all you need to do is read that one sentence to remember. If it’s too convoluted to write in one or two sentences, your function is likely trying to achieve too much at once and could (arguably “should”) be split up.

Also on a different note: Don’t sell your ability to “cludge something together” short. If you ever plan to do this professionally or educationally, you will sadly inevitably run into situations where you have no choice but to deliver a quick and dirty solution over a clean and well thought out one.

Edit: typos