2012-09-15
Explanation
This comic takes aim at a common pet peeve among math and science professors: students who submit graphs without labeling their axes. In the first panel, a person with curly brown hair says "Oh, that'''s gonna be embarrassing," and a bespectacled woman (apparently a professor) at a desk asks "What is?" The professor then explains her policy: whenever a student submits a graph with an unlabeled axis, she writes in "My level of arousal" in the student'''s own handwriting and posts it on her door.
The third panel shows the curly-haired person looking disturbed. The final panel reveals the result: the student'''s graph now has its Y-axis labeled "My level of arousal" and its X-axis labeled "Armadillo population density," turning what was probably an innocuous data plot into something deeply embarrassing. The joke works on two levels: it is a creative punishment for sloppy academic work, and the specific label chosen (arousal correlated with armadillo population) makes the graph hilariously inappropriate.
The votey panel continues the theme with another graph where the Y-axis is labeled "My level of arousal" and the X-axis is "graph jokes," with the equation A = g^3 + 1 written on it. This is a self-referential meta-joke: Weinersmith is admitting that his own arousal increases cubically with graph jokes, which is exactly the kind of joke he is telling in this very comic.