Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The comic shows a man approaching a woman at a bar with the line: "Hi. I'd like you to temporarily relax your standards in exchange for money." The woman, appalled, calls him a creep. He apologizes, saying "That came out wrong," and then rephrases it as: "Can I buy you a drink?"

The joke is that "Can I buy you a drink?" -- a perfectly normal and socially acceptable bar pickup line -- is, when stripped of its polite framing, essentially the same proposition: offering to spend money in exchange for someone lowering their guard or standards. The comic exposes the transactional subtext lurking beneath a common social ritual. By presenting the blunt version first and the euphemistic version second, the comic inverts the usual comedic structure and forces the reader to recognize that the "polite" version is just a more palatable packaging of the same underlying offer.