XKCD Isn't Funny - #1936 - Desert Golfing

Happy New Year, everybody! And speaking of years, XKCD finally has enough comics that if each one was a year, we'd be in WWII! Just in time for WWIII!!! Heh heh heh nahhh forreal though good on Randy for making enough of these that by the end of the year he'll have hit the current year in strip number count.

I am a fan of the old "that was a year ago!" etc -type jokes, since I'm a fan of dad jokes in general. Unfortunately, I think that the presentation kinda obscures the joke.

The first three panels should be shrunk down, to at least half their size, probably a third. We just need to see that the guy is playing the game from before the new years midnight to after new years midnight. Drawing it out over three full panels makes the reader focus on the game, which is the least important part of the comic from a humor standpoint. Especially with the double name-drop, in the dialogue and the title, it makes the comic come off like an ad.

One sec, I'll do a quick mockup to show how I think the formatting could have been done better:

Now I know you're all in awe of my amazing image editing skills, but hold that for a moment. You see how speeding up the setup makes the punchline seem better? (Whether or not the punchline itself is funny is irrelevant to this particular point)

The added countdown in panel 2 also adds some missing context. (I'd have written out 'Happy New Year' but I don't have the humor sans font downloaded.) We all understand it now, 'cause of it being the new year and all, but in five weeks someone who's only just now seeing the comic will see it unmoored from time, and they'll be all confused and stuff (until the last panel but they'll still have to do like a double-take thingy)

Oh yeah, I almost forgot: apparently the iTunes paypal gift card thing doesn't work for all countries, so I'm doing an Amazon gift card this time, and the code is "JJM5-RDB63J-Y3AB". I thiiiink that will work, as long as you use the "amazon.com" address instead of .co.uk or .fr or .etc. Regardless, I hope you all had a good New Year's Eve, and that you have a good 2018. <3

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1620 - Christmas Settings & #1621 - Fixion

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you're all in good health and good cheer. And hopefully, if you're not, a free iTunes giftcard code will cheer you up. Unless you weren't the first person to read this, in which case you're fucked.

This first comic is a good idea, but it has that classic XKCD problem of not actually showing the punchline action. It must be a Christmas tradition. I really want to see a confused guy looking at a kitchen faucet that's echoing out "Ho Ho Ho!"

Also, I know it's not supposed to be taken seriously, but shouldn't the panel for the whole universe be bigger than that? Maybe it's actually just really long on the front side, but the side sides are small.

And this is a Christmas miracle. A genuinely funny XKCD. I love it, just the 'screw it, everything's fixed' attitude. It's so cavalier compared to XKCD's normal approach to science. The last two things on the right hand column don't go with the rest of the comic which is kinda lame, and I think the comic could have benefited from something like a "[name of problem]: SOLVED" caption under the descriptions, but overall this is a lovely gift to get on December 25th.

Merry Christmas, everyone. 

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.

#1308 - CHRISTMAS LIGHTS

 

I'm a day late and I'm sorry. It was Christmas and it was my second post. For a Christmas present, Randy has given me a truly wonderful gift: the exact knowledge of why the other two xkcd hate blogs stopped posting, or at least, a big part of the reason.

How many times can you say the same thing in different ways? Even the most complicated sentence can only be rephrased a certain number of times. Think about chicken crossing the road jokes. Over time, just about every way of getting the same concept across is used, even multiple times.

So how many times can one person, or even multiple people, say “The joke isn’t funny.” About the same webcomic?

This isn’t even a case where I didn’t understand it and had to look the background up. I got the spectrum maps were supposed to be (going from left to right, top to bottom) a fire, a star, and Christmas tree lights. But that doesn’t sound like a setup and punchline. That sounds like the setup, if that. I don’t even mind people taking a break for Christmas or birthdays or whatever, but if you’re going to put something up on Christmas, for god’s sake, don’t do what Randy did here.

This is literally a picture of people sitting by a fire, next to a Christmas tree, with a science-y lens put over everything. It’s like he needed to fill a geek quota for the month. It would have been better without the spectrum thing, because then I could just go “D’aw. That’s cute. It’s Christmas, I’ll give him a pass.” Instead I looked for the joke in this, when there is none. How is this funny? Why would Randy think this would be funny? There’s probably a way to add a punchline to this to make it at least worth a smirk (maybe one of the lights is off-color and someone adjusts the spectrum to the correct color?) but I am not going to waste my time completing Randall Monroe’s jokes for him, especially not on Christmas vacation.

 

For bonus points, he appears to have gotten the fire’s spectrum wrong, at least according to the forums. I’m sure he was just too busy with the artwork to double check his math work.