2010-01-17
Explanation
This comic is a graph joke showing "Belief in a Higher Power" on the Y-axis and "Scientific Education" on the X-axis. The curve rises initially, peaks, and then drops sharply as scientific education increases -- suggesting that more scientific knowledge generally correlates with less religious belief. However, instead of simply declining to zero, the line oscillates at the far right end, bouncing up and down in a series of smaller peaks and valleys.
The oscillations are annotated with alternating labels: "How can that be?" (at each small peak, representing a moment of wonder that temporarily restores belief) and "Oh that's how" (at each small valley, representing the scientific explanation that dispels the mystery). The joke captures the experience of a highly educated scientist who keeps encountering phenomena so astonishing they momentarily think there must be a higher power, only to quickly find the scientific explanation and lose that belief again, in an endless cycle.
The votey panel is a self-referential meta-joke, with the cartoonist saying "Two graph jokes in one week. God DAMN, I'm sexy." This references the previous comic (about the technological singularity) which also used graphs, and pokes fun at Weiner's well-known affinity for graph-based humor in SMBC.