2011-10-14
Explanation
This comic depicts a young boy experiencing puberty and reacting to his first erection with the analytical mindset of a budding scientist or mathematician. He exclaims: "My first erection! It's... oh my God NO! If the rate of growth of my penis over the last second keeps up, it'll be larger than the universe in 276.802 seconds." The middle panels show him waiting anxiously, and then in the final panel he simply says "Darn" -- disappointed that the exponential growth did not, in fact, continue.
The humor is rooted in a common mathematical fallacy: naive extrapolation. Taking a brief rate of change and projecting it indefinitely into the future is a classic error in reasoning (the same mistake behind absurd headlines like "if current trends continue, everyone will be obese by 2050"). The comic applies this flawed logic to an embarrassing adolescent experience, creating an absurd collision between the awkwardness of puberty and rigorous-sounding mathematical analysis. The boy's precise calculation of "276.802 seconds" makes the absurdity even funnier by implying he did the math in his head instantly.
The votey shows the boy thinking "I guess my life is a failure..." -- a punchline that exaggerates adolescent melodrama by suggesting that the failure to achieve universe-sized proportions is a genuine life disappointment, capturing the overblown emotional stakes of puberty.