So, before we start, you all remember that old "orange you glad I didn't say banana?" knock-knock joke, right? It was really popular in my school around first grade and I just realized now, twelve years later, that it doesn't really make sense. Why are we supposed to be glad that they didn't say banana? Is there a famous 'banana' knock-knock joke that just never made it to Lippett Elementary? Or is it supposed to be sarcastic, that we're intended to be frustrated that they didn't say 'banana'? That just leads us to the same problem! I'd say it could be a dick joke but then why did children who didn't even know that 'dick' is a slang term for the male genitalia enjoy the joke?
Maybe I was just raised on jokes that were too good, and now everything else feels like a letdown. When I was a kid, my dad would sit me across the campfire so as to lure the mosquitoes away from him and he'd tell jokes like "three men are at the top of the Eiffel Tower"* and other such good jokes for developing minds. And then I grow up and all the world has to offer me is this garbage!? What the hell, world?
I think this comic would have demonstrated from added visuals for more reasons than usual. SMBC does a thing sometimes where there'll be a story broken up into short captions, each caption getting a panel. It's a good system that would work well with this joke so that the visuals could kindof explain what the joke of each level is to us normies. In addition, it'd make the comic more visually appealing. The lone stick figure just makes it look more barren, like a desert with a single cactus in the distance.
This comic reminds me of those really niche meme pages (or, if you're over thirty, magazines). It actually becomes funnier if you step back, forget about the context, and just pretend its an intentionally obscure joke. Live for a moment in a better world where XKCD has self awareness and is poking fun at it's tendency to make jokes most people won't get.
In other news, the latest Questionable Content mini-arc actively annoyed me a little with how quickly it got resolved. I was so hyped for conflict and drama, even if it is kinda high schoolish in nature. And then it just... resolves, they text each other and everything is okay again. That's not an arc! That's barely a story! What lessons has anyone learned from this?
It's especially annoying since Clinton totally had the righteous anger thing going on and then Claire sends him "I'm sorry. I was wrong. Please forgive me. <3". That is not how you text-apologize, if it is ever appropriate to text-apologize. You send a "Hey" and then "Can we talk?". That's like basic text etiquette shit right there. If you're gonna do the full apology in the opening, you at least type four lines, put some effort into it.
This does, however, further my theory that Claire is a psychopath. Like Clinton says, she brought him to the coffee shop under false pretenses (or at least deliberately misleading pretenses: he didn't expect to see Emily there and has to make a quick mental adjustment because he wasn't prepared), without talking to Emily first to see if it was a good idea, and then demands support from Martin when things don't go as planned. It's probably not what Jeph Jacques was actually going for (UNLESS MAYBE I CRACKED THE CODE THATS THE REAL REASON HE BLOCKED ME ON TWITTER SO I WOULDNT SPOIL EVERYTHING) but it's a fun alternate reading! Like how you can read Martin as being emotionally repressed by his mom and that's why he's staying in a relationship with a trans woman even though he's not comfortable with it. It's kinda like how you can perform Hamlet so that Horatio is just a figment of Hamlet's imagination if you do the staging and stuff right.
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