pseudoscience
Explanation
The Joke
A psychologist tells a patient: "I want you to look at this ink blot and tell me what you see." The patient responds: "I see a pseudoscientific 'testing' method with no empirical validity!" The psychologist looks down at their notes and says: "Very good." The final panel reveals the ink blot itself — which is a stick figure drawing of a person angrily pointing at something while standing next to water, essentially depicting exactly what just happened.
The Humor
The comic works on multiple levels. First, there's the straightforward joke: the patient calls out the Rorschach test as pseudoscience, which is a legitimate criticism that has been made by many psychologists and researchers. The therapist's response — "Very good" — is ambiguous: does the therapist agree, or are they noting the patient's hostility as diagnostically significant?
The second layer is the ink blot itself, which appears to actually depict the scene of someone pointing accusatorily — meaning the "correct" answer to what the ink blot shows is, in fact, someone calling out pseudoscience. So the patient was simultaneously right to critique the test and right about what the image depicts.
Broader Context
The Rorschach inkblot test has been widely criticized in the psychology literature for lacking reliability and validity, though it still has defenders. SMBC frequently takes on questionable scientific practices, and this comic is a compact, elegant skewering of the Rorschach test that manages to be self-referential without being confusing. Weinersmith clearly enjoys the irony of a test that reveals more about the tester than the tested.