inaccuracy
Explanation
The Joke
The comic shows a scene in a forest where a man with a mustache is speaking to a tree that apparently has a face (as in many fairy tales and fantasy stories). Instead of engaging with the magical talking tree, the man says: "Actually, that's inaccurate. Trees can't form faces that talk, because they lack the requisite anatomical features for speech production." A woman and child stand nearby, looking uncomfortable. The caption reads: "It was a mistake to drop acid with Neil deGrasse Tyson."
The Humor
The joke works by combining two incongruous elements. First, there is the premise that the characters are hallucinating on LSD ("dropping acid"), which would normally produce a shared experience of wonder and fantastical visions -- like a tree with a talking face. But one member of the group is Neil deGrasse Tyson, the famous astrophysicist and science communicator known for publicly correcting scientific inaccuracies in movies, TV shows, and everyday conversation (often via Twitter). Even while hallucinating, Tyson cannot help but point out that the hallucination is scientifically inaccurate. The comedy lies in the idea that his compulsion to correct factual errors is so deeply ingrained that it persists even when his own brain is generating the inaccuracies. He is fact-checking his own drug-induced hallucinations.
References
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist and science popularizer who became widely known (and sometimes gently mocked) for his habit of pointing out scientific errors in popular culture, particularly in tweets about movies like "Gravity" and "The Martian." This comic is part of a broader cultural conversation about the "well actually" tendency among science communicators, which SMBC frequently explores.