The highway cop said, "Walk a straight line." I said, "Well, Officer Pythagoras, the closest you could ever come to achieving a straight line would be making an electroencephalogram of your own brain waves." He said, "You're under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Do you wish to retain that right?" I thought, "Oooh, a paradox!"

In this stand-up bit, Philips riffs on a familiar DUI “field sobriety test” instruction—“walk a straight line”—and derails it with pedantic, highbrow wordplay. By addressing the officer as “Officer Pythagoras,” he comically misapplies mathematical authority to a mundane policing scenario, then escalates into pseudo-scientific insult about brain waves and “straight lines.” The punchline pivots to legal language (“You have the right to remain silent…”) and Philips’s persona: a contrarian, logic-obsessed narrator who treats a routine arrest as an opportunity to savor an abstract logical puzzle (“a paradox!”). The humor comes from incongruity, over-intellectualization, and the clash between literal-minded logic and practical authority.