game
Explanation
The Joke
The comic is titled "New Game" and presents a challenge: state an obvious fact to a nerd and see how long it takes them to find a citation that contradicts it. In the scene, someone states, "This paper provides an example of cow bodies becoming petrified over time, which implies that cows are not made of rock." The nerd at the computer excitedly responds with something along the lines of proving that cow bodies can in fact turn into rock given enough time. A bystander remarks, "Now only 72 straight hours of Google Scholar!" -- implying the nerd has been at this obsessive research for three solid days.
The comic satirizes the tendency of academically minded people to challenge even the most self-evident statements by hunting for obscure edge cases in the scientific literature. No matter how obvious the claim, there is always some nerd who will spend days trawling through journals to find the one paper that technically contradicts it.
The Humor
The humor comes from the exaggerated but recognizable behavior of a certain type of intellectually obsessive person. The "game" is funny because it requires zero effort from the person making the obvious statement -- all the work is done by the nerd, who will voluntarily spend 72 hours on Google Scholar just to prove that, technically, under very specific geological conditions, cow bodies can become rock. The comic captures the joy that some people find in being technically correct about absurd edge cases, and the way that academic pedantry can turn any simple observation into a research project.
References
Google Scholar is a freely accessible search engine for scholarly literature. The comic plays on its role as a tool for finding obscure academic papers that can technically support almost any contrarian position.