XKCD Isn't Funny - #1542 - Scheduling Conflict

Maybe I should do like CinemaSins and just ring a bell every time the same problem happens. Like "Ding! Could be a tweet. Ding! Unoriginal joke."

And this totally is one of the worst examples of both. Like if I was a reviewer that did a lot of swearing and angry, this would be a review to give Mark Reads Twilight a run for its money.

The comic is five words. Don't let the "NSCC 2015" under the headline fool you! That might as well be those scribbles meant to represent text, it has no impact on the (unoriginal, goddamn boring) joke. Even if it was a tweet, it'd be sub-par.

The joke is a worse version of that old joke "The procrastination club's first meeting keeps getting postponed", which, although old, is funny because it has a self referentialness to it. The procrastination club's meeting is being postponed because they are putting it off, or procrastinating. With this comic, we do not know why the national scheduling conflict championships have been canceled. We can assume it's because there were scheduling conflicts, but we don't know that. It could have been because it's a stupid thing to hold a championships for. If that was the reason listed in the comic, that would have been funnier, because it would have subverted the reader's expectation that it was canceled because of scheduling conflicts. Changing the kind of championships that's canceled doesn't change the joke; "Kickboxing Championships Canceled" has the exact same impact on the reader.

I understand that people have bad days, days where they're just not "on". I wouldn't expect anyone to have constant A-game. Even Mike Oldfield, the greatest person who will ever exist, once played a wrong note*. But this comic is just crap. It's clear just from looking at it that very, very little thought and effort went into it, and I find that disappointing.



*On The Orchestral Hergest Ridge, during his classical guitar solo, but that was only because he'd had a day full of interviews and could only do one take and had never played classical guitar or been conducted before.