2010-07-03
Explanation
This comic plays on the stereotype of the ideal lifestyle for engineers. Two men with glasses are sitting together, and one asks "Wanna have sex and play video games all day?" The other responds with "Have we fully optimized sex?" to which the first replies, "My equations say yes." The caption below reads: "Fact: There are gay engineers. Fact: Their lives are better than yours."
The humor operates on multiple levels. First, it takes the common nerd fantasy of spending all day playing video games and combines it with sex, presenting this as the optimal lifestyle. The engineer character cannot simply enjoy things without first applying mathematical optimization, which is a classic joke about the engineering mindset of treating everything as a problem to be solved with equations. The punchline in the caption then flips the setup into a broader commentary, suggesting that a couple who shares both romantic and recreational interests so perfectly has achieved an enviable life.
The votey panel continues the engineering-meets-intimacy theme with one of the characters saying "Imagine my penis is a tesseract," next to a drawing of a four-dimensional hypercube. This extends the joke about engineers who cannot stop being nerdy even in their most intimate moments, bringing higher-dimensional geometry into the bedroom.