XKCD Isn't Funny - #1738 - Moon Shapes & #1739 - Fixing Problems

I'd like to point out that #4 depends on the viewing angle. Imagine you're laying down in a field, looking up. You see the moon like it's #3, but if you rotate your body around, you can see it like it's #4.

Also, #5 is still possible, right? It's just improbable, it should at least get a half checkmark.

It kinda annoys me that Randy decided to caption this "Interpreting the shape of the moon in art". Art doesn't have to be realistic, man! The fact that The Starry Night isn't astronomically accurate doesn't devalue it, it enhances it. The comic should have been captioned "A guide to drawing the moon realistically" or something like that.

#8 brings up an interesting thought: How much human habitation would it take for the light they generate to become visible from Earth? 'Cause the light we generate in cities is visible from near space, right? So it's like vica versa. Also how bright are nuclear explosions from space, realistically?

Anyway this comic isn't a joke, but it isn't really informational either. Like, doesn't everyone pretty much already know this? 90% of the time someone draws moon #6, it's just stylization. This comic really just comes off like Randy complaining that other people don't have the same standards that he does. NEXT!

This is just like that other comic, except without everything that made it good. With that comic, we saw the development of those problems, we felt his exasperation at the exponential disaster that was his computers, and then we got some decent art stuff at the end. This is just a tweet with art slapped on to call it a comic. The recursive phrase suddenly ending out midway is even a regular twitter joke thing (although I'm unable to find any examples at the moment). 

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1734 - Reductionism & #1735 - Fashion Police And Grammar Police

I actually kinda like this one. If we put aside the text only 'could be a tweet' -ness of it, I can get behind it. Since the joke is taking reductionist ideas to their (il)logical conclusion, the joke is self-explanatory enough that you don't need to have knowledge of reductionism going in.

Points are deducted for that SUPER lame explanation of "R", though. At least specify that it's a consonant.

See, the difference is that if someone has really terrible spelling/grammar, I can't understand them.

This comic also has a weird tonal disconnect. It starts off with "judgemental and smug" etc, but then suddenly goes into "appreciate that they way you are interpreted is your responsibility" and "understand...". Then it's "vindictive about... proxies for race", but THEN it swings back to "fun to cheer on". See how they don't really form a united statement?

What I think happened is that Randy started off on one side of the fence, but then thought "hang on, I'm on to something!" and tried to make a short version of a thesis paper on the subject. (Honesty time: I would totally read the full version)

If Randy had picked either "they're both bad" or "they're both good", then that could have been a coherent argument in joke form and I would be able to judge that. As it is, this comic fails to make a concrete statement. Even if it was on one side, the bullet point structure is too direct, almost confrontational, to be comedy without alterations.

I will grant that the original observation is still interesting. However, the real interesting discussion is in how the two groups share root origins or are unconciously operating the same function in different ways. This is the hypothesis, we need the data analysis and conclusion.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1726 - Unicode & #1727 - Number Of Computers

This comic comes off as very hypocritical considering the amount of times Randy's used "turn of phrase is taken literally" as a joke.

Does anyone remember Diary Of A Wimpy Kid? Back when it was a webcomic and good, there was this part where the kid has to hang out at his grandpa's and the only game they have is "Gutbusters" where you tell each other jokes and try to make them laugh, except all of the jokes are super outdated. The example given, as best I can remember, is "Putting financial stability before fiscal responsibility is like putting the cart before the horse."

This comic isn't quiiiite that bad, but it's still not a joke. I'll accept it as a statement, I'll even go so far as to call it 'not the worst thing I've seen this year', but it's not a joke. Even as a statement, it's pretty uncreative, a half-step up from cliché, and it doesn't do a great job at explaining why it's so difficult for unicode to do whatever it is they do.

I guess the visual makes it funnier - not that I'm saying it makes it funny, just that it's less unfunny.
If we were supposed to find humor in the guy trying to control the tides, it loses a lot of its impact when it's just a drawing of a simile. Like, I can suspend my disbelief and laugh at an actor pretending to be an idiot or a drawing of someone being an idiot, but when that idiot is then established to be just being dumb for the sake of a point, the dumbness is no longer "ha ha, he's being dumb!", y'dig?

"This is all setup with no punchline." - me, being an IDIOT as I wrote the rough draft of this post last night. HOw the hell did I miss that huge ass caption that MAKES this comic!?

Fun fact that I've been wanting to wedge into a review for a while now: for ages, my eyes just slid over the caption in #68 and I just interpreted it as the best series of non-sequiturs of all time.

My usual criticism of graph jokes would apply here, but I honestly can't think of a succinct way to turn this into a 'panel' comic 'comic' thing, with a 'plot'-type thing. This is the rare case when I think the graph + caption execution is actually the best way of getting the joke across.

A super nitpicky pedantic thing, real quick before anyone thinks I'm capable of actually enjoying anything: This comic only works for a specific definition of 'computer'.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1722 - Debugging & #1723 - Meteorite Identification

I'm really on board with the concept of this one, but I think something's lost in having it all described to an audience surrogate. I wish we got a shot of him crawling through a dark tunnel, and in his mouth there's a piece of paper with an IP address written on it in blood, something like that. The sword of Martin The Warrior sounds important, shouldn't it get some kind of actual buildup?

Also, that 'long story short' is bullshit. It reminds me of how amateur fanfiction writers will use the word "somehow" to mean "i couldn't think of an explanation but i wanted it to happen anyway". Half the fun of the joke is the transition from boring tech speak to exciting archaeological (?) discovery, and that takes that away.

That last line by White Hat is totally unnecessary as well, it's just spelling out what's supposed to be funny. The correct reaction would be "...wait, what?".

To steal a joke from Jon Levi, I'm not mad with this comic, I'm just disappointed. This was such a cool idea for a comic and we end up with this bland, nondescript, and non-descriptive 6/10.

I'm gonna get killed by getting hit by a meteorite just to spite this comic.

For real though, who has been so personally affected by people who think rocks are meteorites? That's the only group I can think of that would enjoy this comic. I feel insulted on behalf of people that expected an actual joke out of XKCD on the day this went up; instead, they got lectured that they should give up that hope of ever seeing a meteorite.

That interpretation is probably too harsh but this comic still consists of nothing than "You have not seen a meteorite" and it's like fuck you man! I saw one on Monk once!

I actually considered heading to the American Museum Of Natural History where they apparently have meteorites on display, but that's a three hour trip each way and I ain't got that time to give away, sorry. I drew a rough replica of what the blog would have looked like if I'd done that, tho:

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1712 - Politifact & #1713 - 50ccs

The implication this comic is giving me is that no one likes Politifact because it comes at trivial facts that don't need to be disputed. See how it climbs in the window for just "I did not sleep well last night"? But the real reason no one likes Politifact is how it points out how all politicians are liars all the time so it's against everyone. Presumably this is the punchline Randy was shooting for, but the context added by the setup changes it.

XKCD Isn't Funny? Politifact says: Mostly True!

This is a stupid pun and I'm a fan of stupid puns. This one passes on humor alone. That said, it is still CouldBeATweet. Were I XKCD's beta-reader or editor, I'd suggest adding a panel where Doctor is being told something by her supervisor or department head or whatever doctors have. Supervisor could be like "...and here's the last of the forms." and Doctor would say "Geez, this is twice as much as I had to fill out for cutting that guy's leg off." or something. That's just one way this could be fleshed out into a Real Comic, though.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1692 - Man Page & #1693 - Oxidation

I messaged not one, but two friends of mine who know about programming, and neither of them could tell what this was even trying to say. Quoth one (only after reading the explainxkcd page): "it would only be funny to someone who is in serious like, whatever that program was".

Like, there's making a niche joke, and there's making a joke that only people who program Unix can understand. It's needlessly obscure to the point of showing off.

One of Dara O Briain's stand-up movies has him starting the show with a mini-disclaimer about how he won't be making any jokes about Muslims, because "One: I don't know a fucking thing about Muslims. Two: Neither do you." (Ignore the imgur post that comes up if you search that, it's a misquote, watch his actual specials.)

I'm not saying that XKCD should dumb down its material, necessarily. However, given that XKCD is one of the most popular webcomics, I think it would be in everyone's best interest to have something for us common folk to latch onto.

Who the hell would say this? Not that she's trying to defend the car fire, that's the joke, but who would say the word "oxidizing" in any kind of casual conversation? 

The way this comic should have been set up is with a close up of Ponytail's face as she explains the science behind friction or whatever and then goes on to say that fire is just the same forces at a greater intensity (or however actual science would say it). Then in the last panel it would zoom out and two cars are crashed and on fire and she's saying "...so really, this was just going to happen anyway". Funny and educational!

The presentation we're given reads unnaturally, uses visuals as window dressing rather than content, and doesn't even show the actual fire. Lame!

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1676 - Full-Width Justification

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?

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1665 - City Talk Pages

Longtime readers will know about "Could Be A Tweet", my tag for comics that... could have been a tweet. In these comics, the art adds nothing to the joke and the text is a short one liner type thing. Longtime readers will also know that I kinda wish I'd come up with a better name for it, something like "pointless visuals" or "text-driven" but also something better than those. "Could Be A Tweet" implies shortness, which this comic obviously doesn't have, but it does feature no real visuals.

Some guy whose name I can't remember once said something like "comics are where visuals and text become interdependent". The implication of this is that a comic generally shouldn't make sense if all the text is removed or if it's boiled down to just the dialogue. TV/Film is the same way; there are exceptions, but generally you're going to need a steady interplay between audio and visuals. You don't have a guy say "this is a bomb!" before he presses the detonator, you have him hold it up and then when the explosion goes off we understand that he caused it.

The point of this is that while this comic couldn't be a tweet, the visuals still don't matter. Yes, there's formatting that helps us understand that this comic takes place on Wikipedia, but we can also understand that from the caption and the fact that every new line has a number in front of it.

So, while "why is this town so bad at mining" is a chuckle-worthy line, it's robbed of additional impact it could have if we saw a character saying it out loud, seeing their exasperation through their body language and stuff.

Those last two paragraphs connected better when I was thinking over how I'd write this review in the shower.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1647 - Diacritics & #1648 - Famous Duos

@ Whoever commented on my last post a thing that began with "Breaking News from The Front: DATELINE INTERNET", please try reposting it. It looked hilarious but it's not displaying for some reason. Blame Google.

Now, those who read the comments (bless your pure and incorruptible souls) know that Jon Levi really likes this one. And frankly I just do not get it. I mean, I understand the joke, but it just does not appeal to me.

I think one issue is that the art is once again regulated to what is essentially background. The joke would be better served if we saw the screen he was typing on, then his roommate could walk up behind him and go "ry-soom-echth?" and he'd say the caption. It'd make this comic feel more like a comic, I think.

Also, this could just be me being a dummy, but did anyone else not know what "diacritics" meant until after they looked it up? Like you can pretty much infer it from the comic, but it'd be instantly understandable if he just said "accent marks".

Also also, I was exceedingly disappointed when I plugged the transcription into a text-to-speech thing and it didn't make a funny noise at the end of the first line. It just said "resum... degree" like some person who wasn't reading something with a million accent marks on it. Not fun at all.

Sorry again Jon but I am MY OWN MAN who has HIS OWN OPINIONS.

This comic pretty much just feels like those really easy tests back in grade school, the ones that were all about matching the words in column A to the definitions in column B. It also kinda reads like he's just showing off how many duos he knows, and I got TVTropes for that, man.

Now, any of these could probably be funny if they were fleshed out into a full comic. Maybe it could be four panels showing the adventures of Mario & The Beast and four panels underneath showing the "Meanwhile..." adventures of Beauty & Luigi.

As it is, we have to imagine those adventures for ourselves, and comedy shouldn't make you imagine the funny bit. This comic is all setup and no punchline.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1642 - Gravitational Waves - #1643 - Degrees

I feel like this comic would have a lot more impact if we saw more of the effort that went into the making of the gravitational wave detector. Like, this probably cost NASA or whatever a trillion dollars, it already seems anticlimatic to have the GWD just the size of a desk. We should have a whole room of things all blinking away, after at least two panels of hard work by the science people trying to make stuff happen.

Speaking of which, if they already knows that it works, why are they just reacting to it in the second panel. The comic actually makes more sense if you read it backwards. It's funnier that way too, you expect them to be all disappointed but then they're all "Hooray!".

Also, the comic would be funnier if he took out the actual sciency stuff from the last panel. The two black hole merger things are (apparently) actual examples of events that the GWD could detect, and it really only distracts from the joke.

This is one of the times that Randy drawing half of a conversation's participants offscreen could make sense. If the guy was standing next to a window with a temperature thingy on it, it'd make sense that the other guy would be calling from offscreen. He's probably folding clothes or something and wants to get it done so he doesn't want to have to leave the room and stop.

As it is, we should see two stick figures, and Offscreen should start his sentence with "While you've got your phone open" because that is the Polite Phrase.

It was nice of Randy to add in the good sides of Fahrenheit, even though it is the obvious inferior system. It feels charitable, and I approve. That last dot on the chart is really telling though. Who thinks "I am going to deliberately respond in a way that my friend will not understand for non-humorous purposes" and then thinks "Hmm... that probably makes me a bad friend."? Like, no, it makes you a straight up asshole. Say... that reminds me of a famous webcomic strip.

The 'radians' punchline just doesn't make sense. Like I'm all for making fun of stupid people and making fun of people who made innocent mistakes (especially if they are small children), but that's just not something someone would say. That's essentially saying gibberish, it doesn't have any relevance to the question. Randy should have made the guy say "Kelvin" instead, since that is an actual temperature scale, so it'd be technically correct but completely useless, unlike the radians answer, which is incorrect on a few different levels as well as being completely useless.


On an unrelated note, I don't know how familiar any of you guys would be with The Cringe Channel, but I'm mildly surprised a screenshot of this blog hasn't been sent in. The caption would be something like "This guy has spent more than two years 'reviewing' XKCD and complaining about how it's not funny."

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1640 - Super Bowl Context - #1641 - Hot Dogs

You know, I feel like Randy would be not uninteresting on a podcast type thing. One of those talky type podcasts where two or three people just have a conversation and the listener is just along for the ride. It'd be neat to hear his statistics which I'm assuming would be mostly accurate, and then the other people could be like "Oh, I wonder why that is? Maybe it's..." and everyone would learn and have brain juices flowing and stuff.

I don't think it works in comic form. It really just feels like he's showing off. It's like when Notch was complaining about how hard it is to be a billionaire. Excuse me for not being moved by Randy's plight of having too much knowledge to contain in his brain.

White Hat's appearance is also kinda confusing. If I didn't know his history, I'd say he was the reasonable one. That's the problem with having archetypes instead of dynamic characters, when they act outside of their usual boundaries it's offputting, even though it is more realistic.

Before I went vegetarian I used to just chop up the two leftover hotdogs and mix them with the leftover beans and onions in a bowl with some brown sugar, it was delish (that's 'delicious' for you people that aren't hip to the vibes).

I really wish we got to see he condom person. It could add to the joke a lot if we got even a smidgen of quasi-characterization. I'm not saying that we need their whole backstory, but it'd be cool to see a little bit of what type of person they are. Like, we'd get a different feeling of the punchline if it was Black Hat saying it than if it was some gross unshaven person.

I also really want to know why the person is putting hot dogs in condoms. The obvious explanation is that it's a dildo substitute, but just imagine the other possibilities! Maybe the other person has discovered that hot dogs cook really well in condoms, which could then lead into a fun double-subversion if he's then asked how he found that out and he says "Oh I was gonna fuck myself with one and I wanted to see if it was better or worse cooked. ...why, you don't do that?" Or, if it's Black Hat, maybe it's the start of some fiendish scheme to terrify the populace with floating penises (the condoms would be filled with helium).

Someone tell Randy to do a What If about how much helium gas it would take to float a thousand hot dogs in condoms.

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.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1632 - Palindrome & #1633 - Possible Undiscovered Planets

"A Man, A Plan, A Canal: Panama" is my favorite palindrome, Randy, how dare you mess with it.

This is pure CouldBeATweet. Yes, it's very clever, but it is under 140 characters, the visuals mean nothing, and there is no context for it. Just use your twitter already. You don't have to tweet everyday, it's okay! Just tweet these jokes that have comics as window dressing instead of as content when you come up with them. And then make another joke into a comic!

Also follow me @Greg_Greenwell, I tweet deep thoughts sometimes.

I'm kinda lowkey wondering if #1632 was simple so he could spend more time working on this one. Also damnit I just realized I totally forgot to reference #631 in my review of #1631. #MissedOpportunities

At first I was kinda like "who put jokes in this science", like the jokes distracted from the facts, but then I realized that the comic is actually totally consistent. The silly bits aren't silly because they're untrue, they're silly because an ordinary science poster wouldn't feature them even though they technically are on the scale.

Some of the bits even made me think a little, and I love thinking! I'd never have considered that we can discount certain planet positions because we'd see them during the daytime, that gives me a new perspective on planet-hunting.

If this was just inspired by the Planet Nine thing, then Randy actually put effort into making it more than that, and that is super cool of him.

It doesn't really hold up as a joke, since we read from left to right and the funny bits are on the bottom left and there's a bunch of blank space in the bottom right, but it definitely holds up as an infographic with jokes in it.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1630 - Quadcopter & #1631 - Longer Than Usual

I really like the concept here. I think there was a genuinely funny idea behind this comic. However, the parallel he's going for isn't executed correctly. The guy should be flying around a small quadcopter (which, just saying, is a stupid name for a thing) and then a fully grown helicopter snatches it out of the air. Having the quadcopters attack him muddies the metaphor a little. That said, I think the final punchline is still amusing, just not as amusing as it could have been.

The art is pretty iffy on this one, though. I understand why it's hard to draw quadcopters, but that doesn't change the fact that it's really hard to tell what they are from the visuals alone.

It's funny that it took me longer than usual to review this comic, huh? Let's just pretend that was intentional and also that it was funny.

It took me a minute to realize the joke, but when I did I legitimately laughed out loud. It is text only, but to be fair to Randy, I can't see it working with visuals. You'd have to make the visuals really vague for it to be interpreted in these two wildly different ways. Unless maybe you're dating an online AI? Maybe you're dating Google!?

This still loses points for being CouldBeATweet, but the end result still gets a passing grade.


Apologies for the unintentional hiatus lately. As much as I value my fanbase and as much as I enjoy putting out that #content, this blog does end up on the low end of my priority list when Real Life stuff happens. I'll do my best to catch up quickly :)

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1591-1609 - EPIC CATCHUP REVIEW OF SADNESS

I probably should have just done this directly after the hiatus. It'd have definitely been better than being behind for two months, but at least I'll be able to get back into the swing of things in time for December and the two year anniversary. For now I'll be channeling my inner Rob Mason (for there is a Rob Mason in all of us, right next to the Slim Shady) and giving you some shorter reviews that may or may not be fleshed out in future.

#1591 - Belle's Theorem
It's executed well, and I appreciate that I don't actually have to know what Belle's Theorem is to understand the joke, but the joke is just a preachy thing about how people don't understand science. D+

#1592 - Overthinking
It has footnotes. Might as well be Mallard Fillmore. F

#1593 - Play-By-Play
This reads like every pretentious 'I'm too smart to watch sports' comment I've ever seen, with a hint of the played-out 'common words' joke thrown in. Really boring art too; we should see at least a popup thing of the diamond. D-

#1594 - Human Subjects
Okay but why are her subjects awful? Are they criminals? Mentally disturbed? Republicans? (yuk-yuk) That context could add so much to this joke. We don't even get to see them do any of the things. C-

#1595 - 30 Days Hath September
I assume this is supposed to be a relatable joke but I don't have this problem since I'm a smart cookie. That wouldn't be an issue except no joke is made about the problem other than that it exists. F

#1596 - Launch Status Check
Why doesn't anyone ever oppose these things? There should be at least one guy getting progressively more and more frustrated at all the unprofessionalism. There should at least be some acknowledgement that this is immature. There are tumblr posts kinda like this that go like "me as a doctor: woah dude youve got like tons of bad stuff in you" or something like that. And they're kinda bland and interchangeable but they pretty much work because the structure of the joke makes it clear that the joke is their own immaturity or incompetence rather than just 'what if everyone was stupid'. D+

#1597 - Git
Would have been better if the third line just ended at "No idea." but then it would have been CouldBeATweet so hmmmmm. Nice use of that context that #1594 was missing and it's pretty much understandable even though I'm not Programming Guy so C+

#1598 - Salvage
Wow! Nice job on this one, excellent non-verbal exposition, pretty good art, and the punchline hits you all at once at the end. This is my favorite kind of XKCD. A+

#1599 - Water Delivery
Boooo on the reused building and water bottle art and kinda ugly colors but yayyy on most of the rest. It gives topical background and illustrates the idea well. Unfortunately, it does have that 'feels like a presentation' thing going on, similarly to #1400, where the idea is presented in the manner that's easiest to understand instead of the way that brings out the humor the most. The captions should have been the first and last panels and the comic should have been the middle panel. B

#1600 - MarketWatch
So they noticed it happening... but also they were doing it intentionally and didn't want to break the pattern? Huh? Why is this event occurring? I have so many questions. Also the newscaster's hairline clips through the side of her head. F+

#1601 - Isolation
First reaction: 'this is just #1227 but visual and not quotes. After getting to the punchline: "oh. that's okay then". Full credit where credit's due, my expectations were successfully subverted. Nice double meaning in the title, too. B+

#1602 - Linguistics Club
It's CouldBeATweet, but it'd be a funny tweet. It's got that rhythm that one liners are supposed to have, and that little line between the two halves helps bring that out, improving on what the text-only version would have. C+

#1603 - Flashlights
I really like how the person says "I guess?" because that's totally the reaction of everyone in the audience. Lighting a forest on fire seems more Black Hat than some random dude, though, who is he to burn down all our precious oxygen-generators? Anyway pretty lame punchline, we should see the burning forest, D+

#1604 - Snakes
Why did it have to be snakes? Haha, I'm being silly, I'm not actually Indiana Jones, I'm Greg Greenwell (for now)! It's a nerd joke, but it's a nerd joke most people will get, I think. It's CouldBeATweet though, which is of course unforgivable. Also it's weird that he'd color the snake considering how hard it is to see. C

#1605 - DNA
It's a White Hat comic. It strammans and simplifies the opposition so that Randy's OC can win. Nothing is new. F-

#1606 - Five-Day Forecast
Well. That's dark. I'm kinda sad now. Also that is some reused art assets. D

#1607 - Supreme Court
thewecomicsreview likes it! It'd have been funnier to see the supreme justice saying it from his podium thing though. C+

#1608 - Hoverboard
It kinda feels inevitable that XKCD would do a flash game comic, and honestly good for it, even if it is a blatant gimmick. The controls are pretty decent (although not as good as the controls for Cubified, the free flash game available through desura, that I did the soundtrack to) and it was a good choice to have an infinite jumping mechanic. It's also pretty neat that it lets you discover the true expanse of the game on your own.

It is, however, pretty lame that parts of the scenery are non-solid while looking exactly like the solid scenery, making some navigation a trial-and-error process. The bigger spaceship thing has too many interlocking corridors, meaning that it becomes confusing without a built-in area map. And that island in the sky with no indication that it's there but it has two coins? Dick move, Randy, how was someone supposed to discover that? Lern 2 level design.

but if you want to add a soundtrack, Randy, seriously, hit me up. Not even joking on this, I'll do it for pennies.

#1609 - Food Combinations
LIES, Randy, LIES. I've told people many times that red Doritos taste good with milk and/or dipped in chocolate pudding, and not a single person has ever even entertained the possibility that I am right (even though I am, as always). And likewise, no one could ever convince me to try ice cream with eggs. D-


So I know this isn't my usual thing, but if you don't like it, just remember that A) it's not going to be a regular thing, stick around for a typical review tomorrow, and B) the first comment on Rob's post about me existing was that my reviews are too long and this is my appeasement of them.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1577 - Advent

I'd like to see what it would look like if Stickman Jones didn't have that slight white aura around him. I don't want to criticize it even though it looks bad because I can totally imagine the comic looking even worse without it.

I do appreciate that Jones is there, though. Without him, this comic would have naturally had the reader as the assumed receiver of the gift, and it would have come off like one of those annoying "you are wasting your life" things. I'm the guy behind XKCD Isn't Funny, I know I'm wasting my life, I don't need to be told!

And while I also appreciate the effort I presume went into drawing the calendar, why is the calendar all we see? Why isn't there a bow on top and someone presenting it really happily? It doesn't look like it's a gift, is what I'm saying. It looks like this is just something he's owned and is contemplating before he opens the next flap thingy.

Another thing that would have added to the joke: A single flap visibly undone, and a piece of stale chocolate in Stickman Jones' hand. Just picture the scene: He now knows exactly how long he's got to live, and all he has with him to console himself is a sub-butterfinger slab of processed cocoa and vegetable fat.

This comic is technically Could-Be-A-Tweet (coming eventually to a TVTropes page near you!*), but I'm feeling the need for the art on this one. It could just be the way the caption's phrased, but wouldn't it be a bit confusing to just have "Unsettling gift: Life Expectancy Advent Calendar"? It could still definitely be fleshed out into a multi-panel comic, but that doesn't feel necessary to me here.

I'm also glad that Randy didn't make it into an infinite birthday cake or something like that, with a candle for every day of life. Because that would have meant that there would have been infinite birthday wishes, and I really hate SJWs (Stickman Jones Wishes).


*if my audience becomes big enough to influence such things.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1570 - Engineer Syllogism

I totally had to look up what syllogism meant, but that's totally a personal failing on my end.

This comic is thirteen letters too long to be used as a tweet, but it's still one of the most "could be a tweet" comics XKCD's put out. Look how text-driven it is, to the point where it lists out the segments of the joke. It might as well be labeling panels one through three with a big caption saying "SETUP" and panel four with one saying "PUNCHLINE". It's so dry. I understand that keeping it as a syllogism requires the different statements to be numerically labelled, but why does it have to be a syllogism? It just subtracts from the humor the joke could have had without adding anything.

The punchline is also actually impossible. He hasn't even finished deciding to enter the stock market, and he's already lost all of his money to it. Is exaggeration for comic effect a thing? Sure, but there's a limit. Like, it could have been funny if he got a few more words in and had his hands on the keyboard with little "type type" sound effects, but when he clearly hasn't actually started it's a lot less fun to see him get cut off.

In conclusion, it's more like an engineer sylloJISM!

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1560 - Bubblegum

It's really convenient how explainxkcd gathered a little collection of previous parodies of the "kick bubblegum and eat ass" line to compare this comic to. As of time of writing, all the examples listed are one line, just like the line they're parodying. Even when XKCD last parodied it (it's in #1110 so I can't link directly to it), Randy only added a one-word response from another speaker.

With this, the (already lame) joke is stretched out by a beat panel and a line that doesn't work.

The idea that the two parts of the line are related is kinda clever. It'd have been funny to see Duke Nukem say "I'm here to kick ass and chew bubblegum." and then blow a bubble which kills someone. Unfortunately, the two parts of the parodied line are combined instead, as if we're parodying the parody.

I guess we could say that XKCD tried to have They Live / Duke Nukem parodied, but it just ended up parodead!

Also, I don't know if I'm just jaded, but the "make friends" thing strikes me as very Children's Movie. I understand Beret is sometimes supposed to be the 'naive and childlike' archetype, but there's not being angsty and there's The Lorax Movie.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1557 - Ozymandias

Man, Ozymandias is a good poem. Not as good as the Breaking Bad episode it's named after, though.

Recursion jokes are generally pretty easy to like, but usually there's some kind of fourth-wall breaking or some other meta thing going on. Like this. Or that one story from that Stinky Cheese Man book that I can't remember well enough to describe properly. And those are funny because they're playing with the format of their respective mediums, it's like a meta thing.

This comic, however, is a more simplified version of the joke, being entirely monogue and therefore an example of CBAT (a demo version of Zubat). And when we have this kind of comic, where it's just a pretty lame gag, I really feel like there should be something else in there. Even if it's just the other person getting annoyed or a shitty meme, that's another level to the joke. And there should be another level to the joke when there's so much room for one.

If this was just a quick throwaway line in a movie or a show or even a standup act, I'd be fine with it. But standing on its own, without any support, it just falls flat.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1546 - Tamagotchi Hive

What a neat idea. If only it was a joke. Like, seriously, this isn't a joke, this is the setup at best. It's a kinda cool thought, but it doesn't go anywhere.

Reading the explainxkcd page for this one made me realize the gigantic missed opportunity of this comic. The alt-text mentions the singularity and apparently the style of the art is a reference to the Matrix (which I have never seen). Imagine a parody of The Matrix with Tamagotchis as the humans!

Also blah blah 'art adds nothing' blah blah. It's fifteen characters too many to be a tweet, but my point stands. On the "showing" to "telling" scale, he's almost all the way to the very end of "telling". The only way he could get further is if he moved to a text-only transcript style.