2010-07-13
Explanation
In this comic, a young man comes out to his parents by saying "Mom, Dad... I'm gay." Rather than reacting with the emotional responses one might expect, his mother immediately asks "How gay are we talkin'?" -- treating his sexuality as something that can be precisely quantified. The son replies "6.4 homohms," inventing a fake unit of measurement (a portmanteau of "homo" and "ohms," the unit of electrical resistance). His father, consulting a chart, declares "That is within acceptable bounds."
The caption at the bottom reads: "There were some advantages to having engineering parents." The joke plays on the stereotype that engineers approach everything analytically and quantitatively, even deeply personal and emotional situations like a child coming out. Instead of grappling with feelings, these parents immediately want data, units, and to check whether the measurement falls within spec -- as if their son's sexuality were an engineering tolerance.
The votey panel extends the joke by showing a bell curve chart labeled with regions for "Pretty gay," "totally gay," and "Absolute gay," further satirizing the idea of treating sexual orientation as a measurable, normally distributed variable. It is a parody of how engineers might try to impose Gaussian distributions and statistical analysis on something that does not lend itself to such quantification.