Title text: Everyone's caught by surprise when a theory of quantum gravity is developed by a sound technician wearing patent leather shoes while editing Clerks II.
This comic is a reference to Albert Einstein who got his first big idea while he was working as a Swiss Patent Clerk. Wikipedia has the details: "Much of his work at the patent office related to questions about transmission of electric signals and electrical-mechanical synchronization of time, two technical problems that show up conspicuously in the thought experiments that eventually led Einstein to his radical conclusions about the nature of light and the fundamental connection between space and time."
Hence the pressure on future Swiss Patent Clerks to also come up with genius ideas while they are working there.
The title text makes the joke that instead of a patent clerk making the next breakthrough theory, as everyone is supposedly expecting, it's instead made by someone wearing "patent" shoes and working on a movie called "Clerks" II. There by suggesting that anytime something called a "patent" crosses with anything called a "clerk", radical breakthroughs in physics result. Clerks II is a reference to the second movie in the Clerks series by Kevin Smith, widely regarded as not nearly as good as the first - which could be said about most sequels, but you get the point.
- [Ponytail walks up to Megan examining documents]
- Ponytail: So.. what"ve you been up to?
- Megan: Handling patent applications.
- Ponytail: Yeah, but... besides that?
- Megan: That's about it.
- Ponytail: You're not, like, thinking about any cool stuff? Just curious.
- For the last hundred years, Swiss patent clerks have been under some weird pressures.
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