trig-warning
Explanation
This comic is about the frustration students feel when learning trigonometry, specifically the sheer number of trig identities they must memorize. A student bursts in yelling "Professor, you son of a bitch!" and the professor calmly explains that concepts like cosine and tangent are "just sine shifted over and tangent is just sine divided by sine shifted over" — and all the "goddamned reciprocal" functions are "just that stuff flipped."
The professor then makes a key insight: trigonometric functions behave as if there are 100 different functions, but really it's just one function (sine) viewed from different angles. They suggest the textbook should open by saying: "Look, they'll all be really useful if you're ever lost at sea and need to navigate using a scientific calculator, but happen to be in possession of a comprehensive table of trigonometric tables."
The student asks, "Would you take that course?" — and the professor says it should be on page one of the textbook.
The comic captures a common complaint about how trigonometry is taught: students are bombarded with dozens of identities and reciprocal functions (secant, cosecant, cotangent) without first being told that these are all just variations on a single underlying concept. The title "Trig Warning" is itself a pun on "trigger warning." The humor lies in the righteous anger of someone who has just realized that a subject made artificially complicated by poor pedagogy is actually much simpler than it was presented.