Definition
Explanation
The Joke
The comic has a header reading "Every social science text introduction:" and shows an open book with the text: "Continued disagreement about the definition of what we're all talking about has continued to hinder progress. For the sake of this work, I will create a new one."
The joke is a meta-commentary on a very common pattern in social science academic writing. Nearly every social science paper or textbook begins by noting that scholars cannot agree on the definition of the key term being studied, and then the author proposes yet another definition -- which, of course, will also fail to achieve consensus and will simply be added to the pile of competing definitions for the next author to complain about.
The Humor
The humor lies in the perfect encapsulation of an academic trope that anyone who has read social science literature will immediately recognize. The comic is funny because it's so devastatingly accurate. Fields like sociology, political science, psychology, and anthropology are notorious for definitional debates -- what counts as "culture," "power," "intelligence," "religion," etc. Every new author acknowledges the definitional chaos, promises to resolve it by creating a new definition, and thereby makes the problem slightly worse. The comic captures this self-perpetuating cycle in a single panel, and the deadpan presentation as an open textbook makes it feel like a universal template that could be copy-pasted into thousands of papers.
References
This comic references the well-known problem in social sciences of operationalizing key concepts. Famous examples include the hundreds of competing definitions of "culture" in anthropology, "intelligence" in psychology, and "power" in political science. The comic captures what philosopher W.B. Gallie called "essentially contested concepts" -- terms whose definitions are inherently debatable.