2012-08-02

An eight-panel SMBC comic. A woman with reddish hair in a yellow shirt sits on the grass at dusk next to a man in a red shirt lying on the ground. She muses, "Sometimes, I think I'm pretty smart. That I've transcended human perception and moved to a world of pure understanding and beautiful abstraction." He replies, "Oh?" She says, "Then I do this," and touches her thumb to her fingertips to make a small circle with her hand. A series of close-up panels show her staring at, pointing at, and frowning over the gesture as she says, "I don't get it." Beside a small diagram of a hand with arrows, she explains, "The length from thumbtip to fingertip has to be roughly the circumference of the finger circle. But it just looks too big. I can't make it NOT look too big!" Growing frantic, she cries, "If I can't comprehend my own fingers, how can I comprehend my own mind? Or someone else's?! Or anything?!" In the final panel she looms over the man and asks, "Did you know there are no muscles in your fingers?" and he screams, "AAAAAH!" The joke: her smug claim of transcendent abstract understanding collapses the instant she fails to intuitively grasp a simple geometric fact about her own hand, spiraling into an existential meltdown. Votey (a small follow-up panel): a handwritten note that reads, "OH GOD DON'T EMAIL ME! I SAID 'ROUGHLY!'" -- the cartoonist preemptively defending against pedantic readers about the circumference claim.