#1321 - COLD

 

 

Fuck off, Randy. We've been over this before. Punching a strawman isn't satisfying. A verbal smackdown is only cathartic if we've seen the person be deserving of that smackdown. If you're going to be unfunny and preachy and annoying, do it in less boring ways, alright? Also, learn to draw stickfigures walking, 'cause you can't.

 

(if I seem more pissed than I normally am, it's because of this)

#1320 - WALMART

I couldn’t analyze this comic. I was too busy staring at the man casually holding a small oil drum under his arm. Is that even legal? Well, he appears to be making a fist at the other guy, so maybe their significant others are both just out of frame, neither knowing that their loves are secret agents for rival organizations. But now that they both know where the other live (three houses down from one another, by sheer coincidence) they must confess everything to the person they’re married to and make a last ditch getaway, before it’s too late.

I can’t wait to see the next episode in this thrilling saga. 

#1319 - AUTOMATION

 



Honestly, this would actually be a pretty good joke, were it not for the format. I want to say upfront that I have nothing against graph jokes by default, but often (such as in the example above) they just come off as lazy.

I forgive Zach Weinersmith* for a lot of things that I don’t forgive Randy for, and there’s one main reason for that (with a decent amount of secondary reasons, but we’ll probably get to them in time). Zach updates every single day, occasionally even more than that. That’s why when Zach comes out with something even this lazy, I’m okay with it. We all have off days, or days where we forgot we had that thing to do, or even days where we couldn’t be bothered.

Randy updates three days a week, with the occasional bigger project/chart/poster. That means he has a minimum of two days to make most given comics. Even giving him downtime and time dedicated to said bigger projects, that’s too much time to forgive jokes in the form of a graph that could have just as easily been fleshed out comics, especially considering that said fleshed out comics would still be stick figures.

 

*when typing up the draft for this, I misremembered his first name as “Anthony”. Just something to consider.

#1317 - THEFT

 



Okay, coooool. After last Friday’s not-quite-shitty-enough-to-complain-about comic, and Monday’s actually-pretty-funny comic, I’m glad we’re back in everyone’s comfort zone with boring-and-simple-failures-at-comedy comics.

Jokes generally aren't funny when boiled down to their base, but just do some compare and contrast with me here:

Today’s XKCD: The phrase “Identity thief” could be taken different ways.

Today’s SMBC: Bankers could be scared off by thinking you’re worth more; like animals can be scared off if they think you’re bigger than them (also girl scouts are badass when trained in New York).

You can see the different level of thought that went into the comics. It'd be difficult to rewrite today’s SMBC and get a notable increase in quality, there’s already a nice setup, good punchline, and stinger.

You could easily improve today’s XKCD. Add some setup; show the processes of stealing someone’s actual identity. This could have been a whole hilarious storyline, the struggle to get one’s identity back, using someone else’s identity. There’s such brilliance waiting just out of sight, yearning to be explored. This comic had the potential to be a hilarious original idea. Instead it sits here, alone, unloved, and wishing it was funnier, rather like me on Friday nights. The joke’s actually made worse by the alt-text. I’m imagining some supernatural personality-swap.avi, but instead it’s just stealing a credit card. That is just lame.

 

Just as a final note, if that’s Randy’s true identity (which at this point, even if it wasn’t originally, he’s probably become the mask), it makes me wonder why someone would want to steal it.

#1314 - PHOTOS

Hey guys, do you know what’s HI-LARE-E-OUS? Preachiness! Truly, nothing is more amazingly humorous than a strawman being smacked down by an author avatar.

The thing I find interesting about this comic is that I’m managing to hate it despite it aligning with my views on the subject rather neatly. Maybe it’s that the actually pretty well done opening panel is the only one with artwork, so every panel after it seems even less impressive than usual.

Honestly, even though I’m a day late with this one, I can’t think of anything else to say. Ugh. If I’m running out of material before even three weeks are up, I’m going to be in a lot of trouble in four.

#1313 - REGEX GOLF

Sorry for the late post, Frank. My brain is still getting its crap together. Thankfully, someone on Twitter mentioned that XKCD was a thing, (thanks, @christinelove!) and thus I return. Anyway…

I have no idea what he’s doing here. However, after Friday’s actually pretty funny comic, I’d just like to do some compare and contrast between the two.

 

See, with this one, you don’t need to understand what Haskell is, aside from that it’s a computer code, which you get from “CODE WRITTEN IN…”. The joke is that Haskell sucks (like today’s XKCD, zing!) and while that’s not a particularly clever joke, it works. And best of all, even if you don’t get it, you can tell what the joke is.

Today’s comic is about something something something code. I’m sure if I know what regex golf was, I’d be rolling in the aisles. Since I don’t, I can’t even say if it’s funny or not, nevermind why.

Just as a side note to make the post a bit longer, when I was in grade school, I had a friend whose last name was pronounced the same way as “aisles” but it was spelled “Iles” or something like that, so that’s how I always expect “aisles” to be spelled.

As another side note, why wasn't today's joke about unluckiness? It's #1313!