2013-05-21
Explanation
A man tells his engineer partner, "I know you engineers aren't much into avant-garde jazz because it's too different, or 'not really music.' But, I love you, so I thought I'd share one of my favorite songs." Music plays from a speaker, and the engineer reacts with unexpected enthusiasm: "Oh wow! Wow! It's amazing!" The man is thrilled and asks, "You like it?" The engineer responds, "I gotta go play this for the geeks at the lab."
The final panel, captioned "Soon...," shows the engineer bursting into a lab full of colleagues, holding up the music and announcing: "Everyone! I've discovered a new way to generate random numbers!" The engineers never appreciated the music as art at all -- they heard the seemingly chaotic, atonal sounds of avant-garde jazz and immediately recognized it as a useful source of randomness for computational purposes.
The joke plays on the stereotype that engineers and scientists are so analytically minded that they cannot appreciate art on its own terms. Instead of hearing beauty or emotional expression in avant-garde jazz, the engineer hears only noise -- but useful noise. It also pokes fun at avant-garde jazz itself, suggesting that its output is indistinguishable from random data.
The votey panel shows the engineer saying, "Art is pointless, unless Joss Whedon made it," adding another layer of geek-culture humor by suggesting that the only art engineers/geeks can appreciate is geeky pop culture like the work of Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and The Avengers).