XKCD Isn't Funny - #1638 - Backslashes & #1639 - To Taste

Man, that The Life of Pablo sure is an album, isn't it?

So, first problem: this comic is text only. We are again forced to ask why it is a comic at all, if the entire content could be done on the blag.

The steady ramp-up of absurdity is done pretty well. It comes off as a bit uninspired to me, but I feel like that could just be the framing. It would be so easy to replace "backslash" with something else and have almost exactly the same joke. I don't get why Randy chose coding as a backdrop. It's not required to make the funny part funny, and it only limits the audience.

There's also the more nitpicky issue of ending the last set of backslashes with an ellipsis.  The implication is presumably that it goes on forever, but it kinda just distracts from the punchline. It doesn't really add anything. I'm also going to get even more nitpicky (the sound you just heard was me leveling up) and point out that adding an ellipsis also prevents it from actually being Ba'al's true name, since it's abbreviated.

Is it just me or is this a weird thing to make a comic about? It feels like some kind of unholy crossover between Seinfeld and Chowder: "So what's the deal with cookbooks? They say "add sugar to taste", but they never tell you how much 'to taste' means! I always just put all my sugar in and hope for the best."

From a purely art as storytelling standpoint, this is pretty bad. The first panel should have a closeup on the recipe, the way it's presented in-comic is exactly like how it would be if the paper was talking, which is confusing. In the third panel, we don't need to see him leaving, we could infer that he's left if that panel showed the stove unaccompanied. Then, in the last panel, the cart thing should be the other way around. He's walking backwards like that, he could bump into the stove because it's hard to see where you're going. It's the wrong way to hold one of those things.

I feel like the joke would be a lot funnier if instead of the guy not being sure how much sugar to add, he was using the vague phrasing as an excuse to just eat sugary food. Or, if he got sugar, and then said "screw it" and just ate sugar right out of the bowl with a spoon. As it is, the guy is just sorta dumb. If you don't know what 'to taste' means, google it, brah.