duh
Explanation
This comic plays on the word "duh" and the concept of things being obvious versus counterintuitive. In the first panel, a character notes: "It's amazing how Einstein's work arrived at the general theory of relativity." Another responds: "Is it really counterintuitive? It's so... duh."
The middle panel explains: "'Duh' means obvious, common knowledge, something everyone knows. But it also implies a level of dismissiveness that suggests the speaker considers themselves above needing it explained."
The final panel presents a bell curve (normal distribution) diagram with the caption: "The right and left extremities have high levels of obviousness/counterintuitiveness but arrive at precisely the middle of the distribution: so, duh."
The joke is a commentary on the "horseshoe theory" of intellectual responses, applied to how people react to scientific discoveries. On one end of the spectrum, something seems obvious because you do not understand it well enough to appreciate its difficulty ("Of course objects bend space — duh"). On the other end, something seems obvious because you understand it so deeply that it feels inevitable and elegant ("Of course the equivalence principle leads to curved spacetime — duh"). Both extremes produce the same dismissive "duh," but for completely opposite reasons. The bell curve visual reinforces this by showing that genuine appreciation of how counterintuitive and difficult a result is peaks in the middle — among people who know enough to be surprised but not so much that it feels natural. It is a clever observation about the Dunning-Kruger-like dynamics of how we assess the difficulty of intellectual achievements.