philosophy-of-sandwiches
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Explanation
The Joke
Two people are eating sandwiches, and one asks to have a bite of the other's sandwich. The other person protests that they ordered the same sandwich, so there should be no difference. The first person insists it is "impossible" because "sandwiches are not platonic entities." They then launch into a detailed philosophical argument: the tomato in your sandwich came from a different crop, the lettuce from a different field, and therefore "you cannot taste precisely what I taste -- our inner lives are unique!"
After all this elaborate philosophizing, the other person gives them a bite, and the first person concedes: "It tastes the same." The final panel delivers the punchline -- "Can I have a bite of your sandwich now?" -- revealing the whole philosophical argument was simply a ruse to mooch food.
The Humor
The comedy works on two levels. First, it satirizes people who deploy sophisticated-sounding philosophical arguments (in this case about the non-platonic nature of physical objects and the privacy of qualia) for entirely mundane, selfish purposes -- here, just wanting to eat someone else's food. Second, the anticlimax of admitting "it tastes the same" after the passionate speech about the impossibility of identical experience undercuts the entire philosophical position, revealing the speaker never really believed their own argument in the first place. The final request to swap again shows the whole exercise was circular mooching.
References
The comic references Platonic realism -- the philosophical idea (from Plato's Theory of Forms) that abstract "ideal" forms exist independently of physical instances. The character's claim that "sandwiches are not platonic entities" is a real philosophical point about the distinction between types and tokens, and the problem of qualia (whether two people can ever have the same subjective experience).