climax
Explanation
This comic shows a man approaching a hotel front desk, telling the clerk: "Good afternoon. I'd like to boldly work myself to an immense climax over the course of several hours." The clerk responds: "Please ma'am, don't make me call the cops." The next panel reveals a sign that says "NO BEING HONEST ABOUT THE ROMANCE/MYSTERY GENRE" with a red prohibition circle.
The joke is a double-entendre bait-and-switch. The man's statement -- about "working himself to an immense climax over several hours" -- sounds explicitly sexual but is actually describing the experience of reading a romance or mystery novel in a hotel room. Words like "climax" (the peak of a narrative arc), "boldly" (vivid prose), and "working myself" (progressing through a book) are all perfectly innocent literary terms that happen to sound lurid out of context.
The humor mechanism is the gap between literary terminology and sexual innuendo. The prohibition sign in the final panel suggests that describing the reading experience honestly is socially forbidden precisely because the vocabulary of fiction ("climax," "tension," "release," "bodily") overlaps so heavily with sexual language. The comic plays on the fact that romance and mystery genres are built around escalating tension toward a climax -- a structure that maps uncomfortably well onto sexual description.
This is a classic SMBC-style observational joke about how language works differently in different contexts.