PEMDAS
Explanation
The Joke
The comic presents a table titled "PEMDAS: A Useful Mnemonic for Order of Operations" — but instead of the standard mathematical terms (Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction), each letter maps to an unfamiliar and incorrect term. "P" becomes "Powers" (x^y), "E" becomes "Enclosures" (parentheses), "M" becomes "Merges" (x + y), "D" becomes "Differences" (x - y), "A" becomes "Areas" (x * y), and "S" becomes "Sections" (x/y).
The Humor
The joke is that the mnemonic has been completely scrambled. While PEMDAS is supposed to help students remember the correct order of operations — Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction — this version reassigns each letter to a different operation with a made-up name. The operations themselves are all real, but they've been shuffled around so that the "mnemonic" would cause you to perform calculations in entirely the wrong order.
The humor lies in the absurdity of a mnemonic device that defeats its own purpose. It looks authoritative and well-formatted, like something you'd find in a textbook, but following it would produce wrong answers every time. For instance, "Merges" is mapped to addition (which should be "A"), while "Areas" is mapped to multiplication (which should be "M"). The labels are also deliberately obtuse — calling addition "Merges" and multiplication "Areas" makes them harder to remember, not easier.
Broader Context
SMBC often takes aim at education and pedagogy. This comic mocks the way mnemonics can become cargo-cult learning tools — students memorize the acronym without understanding the underlying concept, so scrambling the mnemonic exposes how fragile that understanding really is. It also pokes fun at the tendency to make educational materials look polished and official even when their content is nonsensical.