Academic Humor: A Tough Crowd
Description
A four-panel comic strip featuring a green T-Rex performing stand-up comedy. In the first panel, the dinosaur comedian holds a microphone and asks the audience, 'Too many authors to cite?'. In the second panel, he delivers the punchline with a confident smile: 'No problem et al'. The third panel cuts to the audience, a group of various dinosaurs sitting at tables, who stare back in stony, unimpressed silence. The final panel is a close-up of the T-Rex comedian, a single tear welling up in his eye, crushed that his joke has bombed. The humor is a niche pun based on the Latin phrase 'et al.', which is an abbreviation for 'and others', commonly used in academic and scientific citations when a source has multiple authors. The joke plays on the phrase sounding like 'at all', but the specific reference is lost on the prehistoric audience, symbolizing the pain of making a clever, niche joke to the wrong crowd
Comments
13Comment deleted
This is the face you make after dropping a brilliant CAP theorem analogy in a product strategy meeting and the only response is the VP of Sales asking if 'CAP' is an acronym for 'Customer Acquisition Pipeline'
Design review tip: slap “et al.” on the author slide - it’s the Jurassic-era equivalent of git-blame --ignore-revs
Just like our microservices architecture - started with three authors on the design doc, ended up with 47 contributors across 12 teams, and now everyone just calls it 'the platform et al.' At least academic papers have the courtesy to list the first author before giving up
This perfectly captures the moment when you realize your research paper has 47 co-authors and you're desperately trying to fit them all into your documentation's 'References' section before the CI/CD pipeline times out. Just slap an 'et al.' on it and call it a day - though your colleagues might give you the same look as that audience when you abbreviate their names out of existence in the commit history
'Et al.': academia's git log --oneline for bloated contributor lists
In architecture docs, “et al.” is our lossy compression for accountability - great for page count, terrible for blame routing
In the enterprise we mark the ADR “Author: et al” - Latin for “18 stakeholders, zero owners,” aka consensus achieved, accountability deferred
meme channel looks inside dad joke Comment deleted
Since I became dad last year it means you are 💯% factually correct Comment deleted
but it was fun indeed Comment deleted
LinkedIn is not real, it can't be Comment deleted
This feels more like throwing shade at a coworker Comment deleted
avoid multiplication 40=5×8 use bit shifting instead 40=5<<3 Comment deleted