When I did my first writeup of this one, I gave it a positive review. "Good job on this one, Randy." I said, calling it 'clever' and not 'uningaging', 'sorta neat i guess' or even 'meh'.
It was only when one William D posted the surprisingly insightful (and, perhaps just as importantly, brief) comment: "Clever doesn't equal funny. This xkcd was like reading Ikea instructions."
I used to be really into Slenderman. I liked the whole mythos of it, the format, I had this retrospectively-pretty-crappy idea for a mini-series of concept albums about it. Then, one day (I think on tumblr) I saw/heard someone wonder if Slenderman put his suit on in the morning, if he had to get it dry cleaned, etc. It was like a switch had been thrown. What was ever scary about him? He's just a tall guy in a suit with no face. (Dreams In Darkness is still awesome though)
Reading William D's comment wasn't quite that drastic, but it had the same sort of "look at your hands and wonder where you went wrong" effect on me. My blog is called "XKCD Isn't Funny", not "XKCD Isn't Good", and I was two or three urls too late to get any decent variation on "XKCD Sucks" (EDIT: I have since realized that xkcd_sucks.blogspot.com is avaliable but WHOOPS guess I should have thought about that before I got an actual audience on this account).
And this XKCD isn't funny. It is clever, sure, I'll let it keep that praise. The problem is, it doesn't actually have a punchline. It has nothing that takes it beyond "So I had this idea and isn't it kinda neat?". It may indeed be true that the idea is kinda neat, but it's delivered in such a dry way and doesn't have a point. The reaction isn't so much laughter as it is "That could actually work, huh, cool.".
Anyway, a sincere thanks to Will for putting me back on track.
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