pickup-line
Explanation
The Joke
The comic explores the idea of a "neuroscientific pickup line." In the first panel, a character proposes: "Useful man, does a neuroscientist give an intellectual pickup line?" The setup suggests someone is going to deliver a clever, brain-science-based romantic approach.
The neuroscientist character then explains their pickup strategy, which is based on the philosopher Daniel Dennett's thought experiments about consciousness: "I'm just rocking a thought experiment of Daniel Dennett's. Suppose you put a thimble in somewhere's brain spot, so the words around them can produce the closest thing to qualia that can't..." The explanation devolves into dense, jargon-filled philosophy of mind.
In the final panel, someone simply approaches another person and says: "Hey there, wanna play a game of 'Hide the Thimble'?" -- taking the overwrought intellectual framework and reducing it to a crude innuendo.
The Humor
The comedy works on the contrast between the elaborate philosophical justification and the crude end result. The neuroscientist builds up an impossibly complicated theoretical framework involving Dennett's philosophy of consciousness and qualia, only for the actual "pickup line" to be a simple, vulgar double entendre about hiding a thimble. The joke satirizes both the tendency of academics to overcomplicate simple social interactions and the reality that no amount of intellectual sophistication can make a pickup line anything other than awkward.
References
Daniel Dennett (1942-2024) was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist known for his work on consciousness, free will, and philosophy of mind. "Qualia" refers to the subjective, conscious experiences of sensation -- a central topic in philosophy of mind debates.