2012-09-27
Explanation
In this comic, a man asks "Do I need to wear a condom?" and a woman with glasses replies, "Need to? No." The caption below reads: "90% of pregnancies among computer scientists begin with literal phrase interpretation."
The joke plays on the stereotype that computer scientists think in strictly logical, literal terms -- much like a computer parsing input. The woman's answer "Need to? No" is technically correct: there is no absolute need (requirement or obligation) to wear a condom. But the pragmatic, implied meaning of the question is "Should I wear a condom?" or "Would it be wise to?" -- a distinction a socially fluent person would understand but that the comic suggests a computer scientist would miss. The humor draws on the well-known gap between natural language (which is full of implication, context, and social convention) and formal/computational logic (which operates on precise, literal definitions). The result is an unintended pregnancy caused not by ignorance of birth control, but by overly precise parsing of a simple question.