2013-07-27
Explanation
In this comic, a woman tells a man named Dad that she thinks he should talk to his son. The father approaches his son, who is sitting on a couch, and says something about growing a beard. The son pushes back, pointing out that the beard has nothing to do with looking mature and that most of his peers who grow beards have nothing to do with being "real men" -- it is mostly posturing that has no connection to actual personality or character.
The father then launches into a pseudo-intellectual monologue about neuroscience and existential philosophy. He explains that the concept of "self" is an illusion created by the brain, that consciousness may just be an emergent phenomenon, and that free will is debatable. He argues that one''s sense of being a continuous person with a stable personality is essentially a comfortable fiction maintained by neural processes -- that you are no more "real" or "authentic" than anyone else.
The son, frustrated, interrupts: "You interrupted me! I was gonna say I''m afraid to dial the girl I like! Now it all seems pointless!" The punchline is that the father completely overthought the situation. The son just had a simple, relatable teenage problem -- being nervous about calling a girl -- and the dad''s overwrought philosophical tangent about the nature of selfhood made everything feel meaningless instead of helping.
The votey panel adds another layer of humor, with the woman remarking, "No one has ''dialed'' anything in 20 years," poking fun at the anachronistic language that reveals the father (or the comic itself) is a bit out of touch with modern technology, since phones no longer have dials.