a-proposal-3
Explanation
The Joke
A woman is giving a presentation (apparently a funding pitch) for an invention she calls "The Relativistic De-Awkwardizer." She begins by observing that the most common factor preventing human happiness during dates is awkward silences, caused by the fact that humans are boring hairless apes with nothing interesting to relate. She proposes solving this with physics.
Her device works as follows: when one person (Bob) is about to finish a boring anecdote (about a sinus infection, for instance), he is shunted into an "acceleration tube" where he approaches light speed, experiencing far less time than the other person (Alice). Alice can then sit comfortably in silence while Bob is time-dilated, and when she thinks of a new topic of conversation, Bob is decelerated and returned -- from his perspective, he has just finished his boring story at a normal pace. The only downside, she notes, is that boring people will probably be dead or quite old before the conversation ends. She concludes that the project could be completed within one year of funding, with the lone snag being that it would require most of the energy in the universe.
The final panels show the presenter on stage being lowered into an acceleration tube herself, and she shouts that this is NOT a demonstration -- she is just staying in there until the audience leaves. This implies the audience found her own presentation so boring that she is too embarrassed to face them.
The Humor
The humor operates on several levels. First, there is the absurdity of proposing a solution to awkward silences that requires relativistic time dilation -- using the most overpowered technology imaginable to solve the most mundane social problem. Second, the deadpan delivery of catastrophic downsides (boring people dying of old age, requiring most of the energy in the universe) as minor footnotes is classic SMBC comedic understatement. The final punchline -- the presenter herself hiding in the acceleration tube -- is a perfect self-referential twist: she has just given an extremely long, technical, and arguably boring presentation about how to deal with boring conversations.
References
The comic references Einstein's theory of special relativity, specifically time dilation -- the phenomenon where a person traveling near the speed of light experiences time passing more slowly relative to a stationary observer. This is a real and experimentally verified consequence of special relativity, though the engineering required to build such a device remains, as the comic acknowledges, somewhat beyond current capabilities.