2014-05-11
Explanation
The Joke
A man greets someone with "Hey, Steve!" but the person corrects him: "I'm not Steve. I'm Jon. Remember, we met at—" The first man interrupts, explaining he ran a "compression algorithm" on his brain yesterday. Since Steve and Jon are both sexually unattractive, he saved memory space by merging them into one person. Jon tries to make plans, saying "So we can hang out, but I'm Jon, you're Dave—" and the first man corrects: "I thought I merged you with Steve." The final panel has someone observing, "This is why you comp sci people can't remember faces, isn't it?" and the man responds, "Don't make this difficult, Stewart."
The Humor
The comic takes the computer science concept of data compression — specifically lossy compression, where similar data is merged at the cost of losing some fidelity — and applies it literally to human memory and social relationships. The joke is that a computer scientist would treat forgetting people's names and faces not as a social failing but as an optimization strategy, merging "similar" (i.e., equally unattractive) people into a single memory entry to free up cognitive resources. The escalating confusion, where even the merged identity keeps getting names wrong, perfectly mirrors the artifacts you get from over-aggressive compression. The final panel lands the joke by having the computer scientist call someone "Stewart" — suggesting he has compressed yet another person incorrectly.