Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A person stands before what appears to be a judge or official, explaining that they have realized something and would like to get their name legally changed. The official responds that the request is entirely reasonable and asks for the new name. The person then dramatically reveals their new name: "et al."

The humor hinges on the term "et al.," which is a Latin abbreviation for "et alia" (meaning "and others"). In academic citations, when a paper has many authors, only the first author's name is listed followed by "et al." For example, "Smith et al. (2020)" means Smith and several other co-authors. By legally changing their name to "et al.," this person would appear as a co-author on virtually every multi-author academic paper ever cited.

The final panel shows the audience gasping in shock at this revelation, recognizing the audacious scheme: this person has found a loophole to become the most widely cited "author" in the history of academia without actually doing any research.

The Humor

The joke is a clever play on the conventions of academic citation. Anyone who has read or written academic papers is familiar with "et al." as a ubiquitous stand-in for unnamed co-authors. The comic takes this purely textual convention and imagines someone exploiting it literally -- if your actual legal name were "et al.," you could theoretically claim credit for every collaborative paper ever published. The gasps from the audience underscore just how devious and far-reaching this scheme would be. It satirizes the academic obsession with citation counts and publication records, where a researcher's career often depends on how frequently their name appears in the literature.

References

"Et al." is an abbreviation of the Latin phrase "et alia" (or "et alii" for masculine, "et aliae" for feminine), meaning "and others." It is universally used in academic citation styles (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.) to shorten long author lists. The joke touches on the "publish or perish" culture in academia, where citation metrics like the h-index are used to evaluate researchers' impact and productivity.