yeats
Explanation
The Joke
The comic quotes the opening lines of W.B. Yeats' famous poem "The Second Coming" (1919): "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart." These lines are among the most iconic in English-language poetry, painting a picture of civilizational chaos and entropy -- a world spinning out of control with no possibility of recovery. Yeats wrote the poem in the aftermath of World War I and the Irish War of Independence, and it has become a go-to literary reference for apocalyptic dread.
However, the character in the comic then adds: "...but then probably regress to the mean." The caption reveals this is William Butler Yeats shortly after his first statistics class. Having just learned about regression to the mean -- the statistical phenomenon where extreme outcomes tend to be followed by more moderate ones -- Yeats can no longer commit to his own dramatic prophecy of irreversible collapse. If things fall apart, well, statistically they'll probably just drift back to average.
The Humor
The joke plays on the collision between poetic grandeur and statistical mundanity. Yeats' "The Second Coming" is famous precisely because of its conviction that civilization is in irreversible decline, building toward some terrifying transformation. Regression to the mean completely deflates that drama: extreme events are usually just outliers, and things tend to return to normal. The humor comes from imagining that a single introductory stats lesson could have robbed one of literature's greatest poets of his capacity for apocalyptic vision, reducing sublime despair to a shrug and a footnote about probability.
References
- "The Second Coming" (1919) by William Butler Yeats, one of the most frequently quoted poems of the 20th century.
- Regression to the mean: a statistical concept formalized by Francis Galton, describing the tendency of extreme measurements to be closer to the average upon subsequent observation.