XKCD Isn't Funny - #1463-1465 - "Week of December 26th, 2014"

Hello everyone and welcome back to XKCD Isn't Funny after my impromptu Christmas vacation. And since, as of writing, it is the day after Christmas, I'd like to say thank you to all my readers for putting up with me for a year. I'd also like to thank Randall Munroe for giving me a place to carve my own little niche in the Internet. Thanks, readers. Thanks, Randy.

This is a comic that I actually had to think about why I didn't find it funny, which... I guess is a plus? This comic doesn't work because it's just too simple, it's just two (or three, depending on how you read it) people being stupid. That's not funny just by itself, there needs to be a context for it. A guy throwing butter out the window isn't a joke, it needs to be clarified that he wants to see a butterfly.

 

I really like that this comic has a raison d'etre, to use a phrase that's more pretentious than is really required by the situation. It's Christmas, here's a Christmas-based joke. The issue I have with this comic is that, as a hypothesis, the idea behind the last panel is flawed. If Santa Claus is indeed evacuating himself in our houses, what's stopping him from flushing?

 

Here's an idea for an alternate (better) punchline: they discuss the overall economic effects of Santa's flushing. Think about it! Santa flushes every, say, hundredth house. There are roughly 125 million (inhabited) houses in the U.S., which means that Santa would be flushing 1,250,000 times in America alone. The average cost of a toilet flush is 6/10ths of a cent, which means that every Christmas, Santa's been using up $7500 of hard-earned American money (more as we go back in time and toilets get less efficient).

 

Anyway, from this review I've learned it's really easy to mistype "Santa" as "Satan".

 

 

It's mildly interesting to me that this is the second time I've done a week's worth of reviews in one post (which isn't going to become the new standard, if anyone was worried) and both times end with an XKCD PHONE.

 

XKCD PHONE 2 is definitely an improvement over the first, with a semi-decent pun and an actually-pretty-clever intentionally stupid marketing slogan. However, most of my criticisms of the first still stand, such as the inherent lameness of the joke: "imagine if a phone was terrible".

 

At least the wall of alt-text is gone.