The episode: “A Young Man’s Fancy,” the short in front of “The Violent Years,” ep. 610
The riff: Sarcastically inserted as dialog after a young girl ironing clothes begins a question with “Mother…?”
The explanation: More accurately, it’s spacetime and not space that is supposedly curved. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the curvature of spacetime describes the connection between physical, three-dimensional space the fourth dimension, time. He theorized that as one approaches the speed of light, it becomes easier to see the link between space and time. He also theorized a few other things that I would have great difficulty understanding or summarizing on a blog dedicated to jokes from a 25-year-old TV show.
Novelty factor: I got the general gist of what they were asking. I can’t pretend to be an expert in Einstein field equations, but I get as much as the average layman.
MST3k Riff-a-Day 