I've mentioned before how I think sometimes Randy gets his ideas by hitting the 'random article' button on Wikipedia, but I mentioned it in a really bad review so I'm saying it again now in what will hopefully be a better one.
I am a person who believes that anything can be made funny, but some subjects strike me as more difficult than others. Real life murders, for instance. And on the other end of the spectrum, full-width justification. Of course there are jokes you can make about them, but it's going to take more work to make someone laugh than if the joke was about the working conditions of your day job or etc.
This comic would actually be an impossibly good gag if it was converted into a monologue and you had a really boring character say it while trying to chat up chicks. Just imagine it! You see this guy walk up to a hot girl and he goes "You know, there are six ways to make text fit margins...". It'd be like the part in Ferris Bueller's Day Off where the economics teacher is really boring, except better, because there'd be a hot chick!
Anyway, I suppose that the comic does a decent job of that steadily building absurdity thing (although "Giving Up" should really have been between "hyphenation" and "stretching"), and "On the relationship between crap like deindustrialization" is a phrase I'm glad I read, too, but the subject matter is just so bland.
This wasn't a joke that was doomed to fail, but the lifeless presentation is kind of the nail in the coffin. It's just [example] → [label], it's presented exactly like a memo on the subject would be. It should have been the other way around, too, we should see the label then the example. Putting the label first would be almost like foreshadowing, as it is we just get a description of what we just saw.
In conclusion, I watched five episodes of Hotel Hell today, does it show?
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