2013-07-21
Explanation
This comic presents a couple lying in bed together. The woman exclaims in distress, "Oh God. It finally happened." When the man asks "What?", she responds simply: "Statistics." Below this scene is a graph with the Y-axis labeled "Odds that the worst sex of her life was with you" and the X-axis labeled "Length of relationship." The curve is a sigmoid (S-shaped) function that rises from near zero and asymptotically approaches certainty as the relationship gets longer.
The joke is a darkly humorous statistical observation about long-term relationships. If you are in a long enough monogamous relationship, eventually -- by pure statistical inevitability -- the worst sexual experience your partner has ever had will be one that happened with you. Early in a relationship, there are relatively few data points, so the odds are lower. But as the relationship continues over years and decades, with potentially thousands of encounters, the probability approaches 100% that at least one of those encounters was worse than anything that came before. It is not that the sex gets worse overall, but simply that with enough trials, even rare bad outcomes become inevitable.
The votey shows a graph labeled "In my case:" where the line is already at the top almost immediately, with the character self-deprecatingly suggesting that in his case, the worst sex of her life was with him right from the start. This adds a layer of self-deprecating humor to the already uncomfortable statistical reality presented in the main comic.