waggle
Explanation
This comic places a romantic "waggle dance" in a human context to humorous effect.
Honeybees communicate the location of food sources through a "waggle dance" — a figure-eight movement that encodes the direction and distance of flowers relative to the sun. In the first panel, a character says: "Oh God no, she's doing that thing again, where she dangles her butt around and I'm supposed to find it hot."
In the second panel, another character reacts with shock: "Steve! Wait, why did she — oh my God, oh my God." The character then recognizes what's happening: "Are you drawing an epicycloid curve with an eccentricity of... what size is it?"
In the third panel, the character becomes entranced: "She did it. It's a beautiful pattern. Two-lobe rosette!" The final panel shows two characters naked together, with one saying: "This is so romantic."
The joke is that a mathematician (or scientist) would find a precisely executed mathematical curve — specifically an epicycloid (a curve traced by a point on a circle rolling around another circle) — to be genuinely, deeply arousing. What starts as someone dismissively describing an awkward "waggle" turns into mathematical seduction when the observer realizes the dance traces a perfect geometric pattern. It's a nerd fantasy where mathematical precision is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
The comic also plays on the bee waggle dance concept — in real life, the dance is purely informational, but here it becomes romantic precisely because of its mathematical properties.