2013-07-10
Explanation
This single-panel comic shows a bearded man in Victorian-era clothing saying: "I'm sorry, but I only engage in sexual congress via the 69 position." Below the panel, a caption reads: "Vilfredo Pareto was a terrible lover."
The joke is a play on the Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule), which states that roughly 80% of effects come from 20% of causes. Vilfredo Pareto was the Italian economist and sociologist who first observed this pattern in the early 1900s, noting that 80% of Italy's land was owned by 20% of the population. The comic humorously suggests that Pareto would insist on the "69" position because the digits 6 and 9 are related by a kind of symmetry, but more importantly, the joke likely plays on Pareto's obsession with specific numerical ratios and distributions. The number 69 does not actually relate to the Pareto distribution, which makes his insistence on it all the more absurd.
The votey shows Pareto saying "By God this is inefficient," which is the perfect extension of the joke. An economist obsessed with efficiency and optimal distributions would naturally be frustrated by the inherent inefficiency of the 69 position, where neither party can focus fully on their task. This is a classic SMBC formula: taking a historical intellectual figure and imagining how their professional obsessions would comically interfere with their personal life.