2012-12-19
Explanation
This comic depicts a parent trying to give a child "the talk" about sex, explaining that mommies and daddies have sex to make babies. The child, who is apparently a budding statistician, immediately objects: having overheard the parents having sex on 73 occasions and noting they've only produced one child, at least 98.5% of the sex must be for "mysterious non-baby reasons." The child then presents bar chart data showing the circumstances: 13 instances preceded by boredom, 7 after resolving an argument, and 22 during or after an R-rated movie. The child concludes with a prediction model. The parent starts to object but then admits "yeah, actually that's about right." In the final panel, the parent tells a friend "I learned a lot."
The humor comes from the complete role reversal of the "birds and the bees" conversation. Instead of the parent awkwardly educating the child, the child has been conducting empirical research and educates the parent with rigorous statistical analysis. The comic plays on the common parental anxiety about "the talk" by imagining the worst-case scenario: a child who has already gathered more data than the parents ever wanted to share. The parent's admission that they "learned a lot" is the final punchline, completing the inversion. It also touches on the gap between the sanitized "making babies" explanation and the reality that most human sexual activity is recreational.