2009-11-01
Explanation
This comic is titled "Never Date a Scientist" and shows a romantic scene turned awkward by scientific pedantry. A man holds a woman close and passionately says, "Kiss me! Let me taste your sweet lips once more before the asteroid destroys Earth." A fiery rock is hurtling through the sky behind them. The woman, wearing glasses (marking her as the scientist), responds flatly: "Technically, that's a meteor."
The humor comes from the classic trope of scientists being unable to turn off their need for technical precision, even in the most dramatic and emotionally charged moments. The man is trying to have a grand, cinematic last-kiss-before-the-apocalypse moment, but the scientist cannot let the terminological error slide. She is correct -- an asteroid becomes a meteor once it enters Earth's atmosphere -- but her correction completely deflates the romance of the scene.
The votey panel continues the theme with someone saying "Scientists are romantic," followed by "You spend half your time making fish puke," to which the scientist again corrects: "Technically, it's gastric lavage." This reinforces the joke that scientists compulsively correct terminology regardless of context, and adds the additional humor that the scientist's actual work (inducing vomiting in fish for research) is decidedly unromantic, yet they still insist on dressing it up with the proper scientific term.