Freudian
Explanation
The Joke
A person asks why the field of artificial intelligence started during the reign of Freudianism. A bearded scientist-type responds defensively: "Well of course your machine can't think like a human. It doesn't even want to sleep with its own mother. It's not suppressing a single wiener-lopping fantasy." The other person then remarks, "You computer science people need to get out into the real world once in a while."
The comic imagines a scenario where early AI researchers, working during the mid-20th century when Freudian psychoanalysis was still highly influential, would have measured artificial intelligence against Freudian criteria rather than modern cognitive ones. Instead of asking whether a computer can reason, learn, or pass the Turing test, the Freudian-influenced computer scientist judges the machine's intelligence by whether it has an Oedipus complex or castration anxiety.
The Humor
The comedy arises from the collision of two very different intellectual traditions. Early AI research did indeed begin in the 1950s, when Freudian ideas were still dominant in psychology and broader culture. The joke imagines the absurd result of taking Freudian psychology as the benchmark for machine intelligence: a computer fails the test not because it cannot think, but because it does not harbor repressed sexual desires toward its mother. The final panel's remark about getting out into "the real world" is itself ironic, since Freudian psychology's claims about universal Oedipal urges are themselves far removed from empirical reality.
References
The field of AI is generally considered to have been founded at the Dartmouth Conference in 1956. Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory, particularly the Oedipus complex (the idea that children harbor unconscious sexual desires for the opposite-sex parent) and castration anxiety, were highly influential in Western psychology and culture through the mid-20th century, though they have since fallen out of mainstream scientific favor.