public-speaking
Explanation
The Joke
The comic shows a man giving a public speaking presentation. The title card reads "Public Speaking Tip: Start off by wowing your audience with some big numbers." The speaker then says, "First I want you to imagine a cube sitting on the surface of the Earth. The cube is 10,000 meters on each side. Nearly a trillion cubic meters. That's the size of an area that can be used for agricultural pest management, or leaf litter decomposition. It's a really big cube."
Instead of using impressive statistics relevant to his topic, the speaker has become completely sidetracked by the sheer bigness of the cube itself. He never actually connects the big number to any meaningful point. He just describes a cube, tells you how big it is, and then marvels at the fact that it is big.
The Humor
The comic parodies common public speaking advice about opening with attention-grabbing statistics. The humor comes from the speaker technically following the advice -- he does present big numbers -- but completely failing to understand the purpose behind the technique. Instead of using a striking number to illuminate an important topic, he gets lost in the pure abstraction of bigness. The random, disconnected applications he mentions (agricultural pest management, leaf litter decomposition) make it even funnier because they are both oddly specific and completely unrelated to any apparent thesis. The speaker's earnest, thumb-up expression as he delivers this pointless information adds to the comedy. It is a perfect satire of presenters who mistake the tool (big numbers) for the goal (making a compelling argument).