specifications
Explanation
The Joke
The comic is captioned "Never let a chemist read your romance novel." A bespectacled man (the chemist) is reading a romance novel and indignantly tells the author that the phrase "he was hard as steel" is meaningless without a specified temperature and pressure.
The Humor
The joke plays on the collision between romantic literary language and scientific literalism. "Hard as steel" is a common metaphor in romance novels (with obvious double entendre), but a chemist would point out that the hardness of steel is not a fixed property -- it varies depending on temperature, pressure, and the specific alloy composition. At high enough temperatures, steel becomes soft and malleable. The chemist is treating a literary metaphor as a materials science specification, which is both technically correct and hilariously beside the point. The humor also comes from the implication that of all the objections a chemist might raise to a romance novel, this excessively literal complaint about metallurgical precision is where he draws the line.
References
- The hardness of steel does indeed depend on temperature, pressure, carbon content, and heat treatment. Steel undergoes phase transitions at different temperatures, becoming softer as it heats. This is a real concern in materials science and engineering, making the chemist's complaint technically valid, if absurdly misapplied.