look
Explanation
This comic riffs on the "look-and-say sequence," a well-known mathematical sequence where each term describes the previous term's digits.
The sequence shown in the comic starts: 1, 11, 21, 1211... This is the actual look-and-say sequence (also known as the Morris number sequence): you "look" at the previous term and "say" what you see. So 1 becomes "one 1" (11), which becomes "two 1s" (21), which becomes "one 2, one 1" (1211), and so on.
The character reading the sequence aloud reacts with increasing frustration: "1, 11, oh I get it, 21, 1211, God dammit, 111221, 312211, 13112221, Jesus Christ people spent time on this shit, 1113213211..."
The caption below reads: 'Much more interesting than the "Look-and-say sequence" is the "Look-say-react sequence."'
The humor comes from inserting genuine human emotional reactions into what is supposed to be a purely mechanical mathematical process. The "look-say-react" sequence adds a third step — the mathematician's exasperated commentary — to the existing two-step process. The frustration grows as the numbers get longer and more unwieldy, reflecting the real experience of anyone who has tried to manually compute terms of this sequence. It's a joke about how math that seems elegant in theory can feel tedious and maddening in practice.