2013-12-26
Explanation
The Joke
A woman, depicted as a dominatrix-like figure, is standing over a man and commanding him: "Pronounce it NOOKULAR!" The man, in distress, protests: "But it is humiliating! It has two sylla-ahh! Nookular? Nookular? Oh, it hurts so good." The caption reads: "Every physicist has the same fantasy. If they say otherwise, they are lying."
The Humor
The word "nuclear" is famously mispronounced as "nucular" by many people, including several prominent politicians (most notably George W. Bush). This mispronunciation is a pet peeve of physicists and other scientists. The comic imagines that physicists have a secret masochistic fantasy about being forced to say the word incorrectly. The joke works on multiple levels: it takes something that genuinely irritates scientists (the mispronunciation) and reframes it as a guilty pleasure, and it parodies the idea that everyone has secret shameful fantasies by making the physicist's fantasy hilariously nerdy and specific -- not anything conventionally risque, but simply being forced to mispronounce a scientific term. The BDSM framing makes the absurdity even funnier.
References
The mispronunciation of "nuclear" as "nucular" has been a widely discussed linguistic phenomenon. It gained particular attention during George W. Bush's presidency (2001-2009), as he consistently used the "nucular" pronunciation. Linguist Steven Pinker has written about this phenomenon, noting it follows a common pattern in English called metathesis.