Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Perfect

2021-06-04 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
Perfect
Votey panel for Perfect
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic is a grammar nerd's pickup line gone wrong -- or rather, gone exactly as expected.

A man approaches a woman with the classic cheesy line "Hey girl, if I told you you had a beautiful body..." but instead of completing the expected innuendo ("...would you hold it against me?"), he veers into a pedantic grammatical analysis: "...would you resent me for using the past perfect tense, denoting that the act of possessing a beautiful body was completed prior to this encounter?"

The joke hinges on the phrase "you had a beautiful body." In normal pickup-line usage, "had" is just part of a hypothetical construction ("if I told you you had..."). But taken literally, "had" is the past perfect tense, which implies the beautiful body existed in the past but no longer does. The man is asking if the woman would be offended by the implication that her body used to be beautiful but is not anymore.

The caption delivers the punchline: "Sadly, I later will have had no sex-having." This sentence itself is a deliberately awkward construction using the future perfect tense ("will have had"), reinforcing that this man's obsession with verb tenses is precisely why he strikes out. The comic satirizes the type of person who is so fixated on linguistic technicalities that they sabotage normal human interaction.

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