2011-10-23
Explanation
This comic is titled "How Academics Call Something Boring (By Discipline)" and features four panels, each showing a scholar from a different field reading a paper and delivering their discipline'''s version of a dismissive judgment. A philosopher says "That'''s elementary," a mathematician says "That'''s trivial," and a physicist says "That makes sense."
The humor lies in how each discipline has its own coded language for dismissing work as uninteresting or insufficiently challenging. In philosophy, calling something "elementary" means it is too basic to merit serious discussion. In mathematics, "trivial" is the classic put-down, implying a proof or result is so obvious it barely needed stating. The physicist'''s "That makes sense" is the subtlest and perhaps funniest jab -- in physics, where the most exciting discoveries often defy intuition (quantum mechanics, relativity, etc.), saying something "makes sense" is essentially saying it is boringly predictable and therefore uninteresting.
The votey panel shows the cartoonist captioned "Back from NYCC" (New York Comic Con) with the text "Time to sleep for ten years," depicting him looking exhausted. This is unrelated to the main comic and serves as a personal aside about the draining experience of attending a major convention.