A quick note before we begin: xkcd-sucks is currently focused entirely on Jon Levi's Died in a Blogging Accident (go read it, it's great). Once again, I become the only active XKCD hateblog, the end of a brief but lovely era, when xkcd antifans had both between my rapidfire, varied quality content and xkcd-sucks' slower, better researched material.
Today's comic is lame on multiple levels. For one, it's a graph joke. I have never seen a funny graph joke, and I don't think I ever will. They're like unicorns, mythical creatures only possible through unholy surgery or genetic experimentation. Graphs are intended to boil something down to its simplest and easiest to understand form. Putting jokes in that form leaves them in skeletal effigies of what they could be.
Not that the joke would be good in any other form. explainxkcd tells me that it's apparently a just a very vague pun: There's a brand of rum called "Harpoon". Now, I personally don't know that much about harder drinks (quote from my cousin Chris: "Is there a straight drink in your vocabulary?"), so I checked in with my cousin Morgan to see how well known that brand was. She'd only heard of Harpoon cider.
To top it off, the most accessable link explainxkcd could find leads to this website, which only has two pages, one which is just a link and a picture of a bottle, the other which is mailing information given in German.
This comic also shows the downside of alternating between serious informational comics and straight-faced graph jokes; a few people in the forums thought there wasn't a joke at all, that this was just a piece of trivia.
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