standard-deviatin39
Explanation
The Joke
A man complains that he cannot get a girlfriend. His friend asks if he has tried "standard deviatin'" (a play on "standard deviation"). The scheme is explained: you get 1,000 men of low quality to walk past a woman while she sits at a restaurant. This causes her to shift her mental model of the distribution of local mate quality downward. Then you walk by, appearing to be far to the right of the bell curve (i.e., above average) by comparison. The first man objects that this sounds like a pickup artist move, and his friend corrects him: "Technically it's pickup statistics."
The Humor
The comic takes the statistical concept of standard deviation -- a measure of how spread out values are around a mean -- and turns it into a dating manipulation strategy. The humor lies in applying rigorous statistical reasoning to the deeply un-rigorous world of romance and attraction. By deliberately biasing a woman's sample of available men, you can game her perception of where you fall on the distribution. The punchline distinguishes between "pickup artist" tactics (social manipulation) and "pickup statistics" (mathematical manipulation), suggesting that the nerdy, data-driven version of the same sleazy behavior is somehow a distinct discipline.
References
"Standard deviation" is a fundamental concept in statistics that measures the amount of variation in a dataset. The title's misspelling ("deviatin'") is a stylistic choice. The bell curve shown in the comic is a normal distribution, which is the most commonly referenced probability distribution in statistics.