2011-08-02
Explanation
This comic is titled "Why I Have No Friends, Reason #1729: Unimpressive Mindblowing Facts." A woman with glasses excitedly shares what she considers a fascinating observation: the word "recursion" contains the word "recursion" in itself. Her friend starts to be impressed -- "Whooa! That's amaz..." -- before catching on and calling her an asshole.
The joke works on multiple levels. First, the observation is trivially true in the most banal sense: of course any word contains itself. But it is phrased to sound like a deep insight about recursion, a concept in computer science and mathematics where something is defined in terms of itself. The comic number in the title, 1729, is itself a famous math reference -- it is the Hardy-Ramanujan number, known as the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways. The humor comes from the character's social obliviousness in thinking this kind of pedantic wordplay would impress anyone, and her friend's rapid shift from wonder to irritation.