check-please
Explanation
The Joke
A man and a woman are meeting in person for the first time, presumably after connecting online. As the woman begins to say "Nice to finally meet you in perso-", the man interrupts with an excited "Oh my God!" and launches into a breathless observation: there exists a finite sequence of sounds he could make that would guarantee they end up sleeping together tonight. He notes that finding this exact sequence is nearly impossible, but confirms that verifying they are "totally doing it" is literally one step.
The caption at the bottom reads: "The Sex Problem turns out to be NP-complete."
The Humor
The comic maps the famously difficult computer science concept of NP-completeness onto the awkwardness of a first date. In computational complexity theory, NP-complete problems are those where finding a solution is extraordinarily hard (potentially requiring exponential time), but verifying a given solution is easy (doable in polynomial time). The man reframes seduction in exactly these terms: figuring out the perfect sequence of words to say is nearly impossible, but checking whether you succeeded (i.e., whether you're "doing it") is trivially easy -- just one step.
The humor also comes from the social absurdity: rather than simply trying to be charming on a first date, the man has reduced romance to an abstract computational problem, which is itself probably the worst possible "sequence of sounds" he could produce. His approach is self-defeating in a classically nerdy way.
References
- NP-completeness: A concept from computational complexity theory. A problem is NP-complete if solutions are hard to find but easy to verify. Classic examples include the traveling salesman problem and Boolean satisfiability. The comic's formulation -- hard to find the right sequence, easy to verify the outcome -- is a direct and accurate analogy.