XKCD Isn't Funny - #1751 - Movie Folder & #1752 - Interplanetary Experience

Somewhere along the line, Black Hat and Beret swapped some of their characterizations. In the beginning, Beret was the weird one and Black Hat was the menacing one. But then suddenly Beret developed supernatural powers and Black Hat stopped trying so now its just anyone with a hat is abnormal in some way.

Here is my totally evidenceless idea: Originally, it was Bald and Beret, with Bald just listing the titles and Beret interjecting with lines like "Love that one!" or "A classic.". But then Randy realized that the comic sucked and he had Beret actually interject with jokes, but the lines read too sardonically so R swapped B out for BH. It's a good thing the end result is funny, but then that's what you get when you do rewrites.

Black Hat's interjections make this comic. Without them it would be boring, even though the fake movie titles are kinda clever. Titanic having multiple sequels is a funny concept, but it's just a concept until our dark-helmeted friend describes plot elements.

That said, the comic does kinda leave me waiting at the end. There are some good jokes in it, but the comic doesn't really 'move' from start to finish. It's the same kind of joke four times, and we don't even end on a high note, we just get 'Michael Bay CGI' which has been done more times than your mom

's gardening since she's a nice lady and people want to help her with her yardwork.

This comic, on the other hand, is all premise with no point.

Unless it's not supposed to be a joke, but it can't be intended as an informational thing. For one, don't most people know this, roughly? Mercury is really hot because it's close to the sun, Pluto is really cold because it's far away, all the gas giants are gas giants so they're gas and no land, and so on. I'll give credit for Titan, though, that was a new one on me.

Plus, obviously, none of the things can be done by regular people, so readers can't even have fun going through the list. If he actually wanted to let people do hands on things, he should have said to like - this is for Pluto - cover themselves in ice and lie on the beach at night, something like that.

And furthermore, I was once on Jupiter, and

Hey, wait a minute! He already kinda covered this in that one What If?, this is an outrage!


Oh, by the way, Blogger changed so that I don't get notified when someone comments, so apologies if I've missed any cool things anyone's said.

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 - #1689 - My Friend Catherine & #1690 - Time-Tracking Software

Mark Prindle fans may or may not remember that one of his chief problems with Guided By Voices was that they'd release every single thing they ever recorded, even if it sucked and no one wanted to hear it and it sucked. I heard six GBV songs about fifty years ago, so I can't verify this assertion, but I am inclined to trust a man who tells me that Ween is good. 

I think a similar point can be made about XKCD. When this comic idea popped into Randall's head, rather thank immediately thinking "Wait, haven't I done this seven times before?" he thought something else that made him think another keyboard substitution joke was a good idea. 

The world does not need an update every time Randall Munroe comes up with a new keyboard substitution. Or, at the very least, the world does not need it in comic form. 

Here's an idea: Randall is a tech type guy, right? So he could probably hook us all up with an official "XKCD Keyboard Substitutions" Chrome extension thing. And every time he's about to make one of these comics, he just updates the extension. Unless making Chrome extensions is actually super hard, in which case I apologize for my unreasonable expectation.

This one actually does not get a full thumbs down from me. It's not a thumbs up, either, though. The Star War, Wikipedia, and Jack And Dane captions all come off as "Hey I'm self consciously quirky!"

Brief bit of navel gazing: Maybe the reason that I personally dislike Randall's self-conscious quirkiness is because I've always been self-conscious of my own behavioral abnormalities, and my self loathing manifests as projection. Then again, people who try to seem unique and special are mostly grating by default, so maybe not.

What makes this comic work (or at least, not totally suck) is the "installing and configuring time-tracking software". I feel like it really does say something deep about this human equation with which we are all afflicted. For lack of a better comparison, it's like how Oedipus tried so hard not to fuck his mom that he ended up fucking his mom - this guy tried to keep himself on task through time-tracking software that he ended up going through his work time.

The thing that ruins my quick stint at being an English major is the aforementioned three 'quirky' slices of the pie chart. Irony is so delicious, don't add sides of broccoli. [Broccoli, in this metaphor, represents the bad parts of this comic]

Also it would have probably have been better to show a guy installing the time software on his computer before showing us the graph, but I basically took that criticism as read.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1656 - It Begins

It's kinda funny that this counts as CouldBeATweet when it's literally (literal in the literal sense) a drawing of a tweet. And not even an original one, I've seen pretty much this exact joke before at least a dozen times, except those times were better since it was an actual comment on an actual news story. And even before that, the joke that any given news is the beginning of something horrible has been done on pretty much any sitcom.

Now, to be fair to Randy, this specific way of telling this joke has not been done before. By presenting it in this form, with faux-screenshot and separate caption, he is making a wider joke about how the "It begins." caption joke can be done. Which would be fine, were it not a ripoff of #1022. It's not even a better ripoff, since that one was applicable in almost infinite situations and this one is only to 'make your day more dramatic' which it doesn't even do. It, at best, makes you seem kinda funny, and at worst, makes you look like a conspiracy theorist.

As mentioned previously on this blog, I try not to mention the alt-text too much, since it is both bonus and hidden, but today's doesn't even make sense. "You can also try 'Yikes'.". That's just a statement! You can say that on literally any news story and all it means is that you're offput by it. How is that dramatic at all? It's not even a good expression of surprise, it reads like condescending disapproval. (that last sentence brought to you by the anti-SJW side of tumblr)

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1588 - Hardware Reductionism

This comic kinda reminds me of the comic that started the whole XKCD-hateblog thing, #398. It's almost not really criticizable, but it's got one tiny flaw that ruins it. It's kinda like that one Dara Ó Briain routine about how 2012 could have been the greatest movie of all time with a one-word change. It's not that drastic, but still.

If we talked about phone hardware the way we talked about brain hardware, we'd say things like "Researchers have finally discovered the connection between the button and taking a screenshot" or "Isn't it incredible what this software is capable of?". The comic should be captioned "if phone hardware was like brain hardware", because that is what is being portrayed.

Points are also deducted for not having a second panel captioned with "If we talked about brain hardware the way we talk about phone hardware". It doubles the entertainment value and you don't even have to think of a new joke really. It almost writes itself.

The Ghost Of Carl Wheeler further commands me to mention that this is yet another joke about blurring the line between humans and technology, and that this theme has been thoroughly explored in earlier XKCD strips to the point where it becomes boring.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1573 - Cyberintelligence

First off, how does one pronounce "FY2015"?

Mainly though, where did Randy get the idea that people don't say "cyber"? I see that like every time I go on Omegle! In addition, there's this (credit to Robert Mason for bringing that to my attention via retweets). I could kinda see it if he's saying that people don't use it in the technical sense, but even then a quick google search reveals a decent amount of NERDS saying it.

The idea of someone sinking eight billion dollars into something and not realizing that one of their base assumptions is flawed is kinda funny, but none of the money was actually wasted, they're still going to give results, it's not like they have to admit that cyberintelligence doesn't exist, nothing is actually lost. If Mel Brook's quote "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down an open sewer and die." (and it is), then what's the death here? Nothing. It's not like that one study that tried to find a correlation between autism and vaccines for like four years before concluding there isn't one. (I really wish I could link you but I can't find it)

The joke is just #1258 in a Halloween costume. It's just an observation of something being less prevalent, and it doesn't actually do anything with that observation, although it at least pretends to, kinda.

In conclusion, could "XKCD Isn't Funny" be abbreviated to "XIF"?

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1568 - Synonym Movies 2

There's nothing I can say that hasn't already been said.
I'm just repeating myself repeating someone else
equally incapable of uttering a single new thought.
Yet you are ever worthy of adoration,
so how can I for a moment cease to lift my heart in praise?

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1563 - Synonym Movies

This was such a good joke that I did it almost exactly the same except nine months ago and better.

And it's not like this is new material for XKCD either, really it's the same joke as #444, #547, #722, #1133, and #1436. And of those, only the first two took it beyond just "using simpler words". Furthermore, #1133 was an entire poster of the joke, essentially doing the most with it at one time as can be done.

I can see the appeal to this joke, really, I can. But I can't think of any one-part jokes that wouldn't get old after five executions (at least when one of them was as big as #1133). It's not even a running gag, it's just doing the same bit again and again, and it's just boring at this point.

And way to spoil the ending of The Empire Strikes Back, Randy.

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 - #1555 - Exoplanet Names 2

The day is December 18th, 2015. Millions of fans sit in movie theaters the world over, waiting, shivering with excitement. Finally, after what seems like an eternity of trailers, the Star Wars logo appears onscreen. Unfortunately, Disney hired Randall Munroe as a creative consultant, so the audience is treated to the first six Star Wars films in slightly edited formats to provide context for the new one.

I would understand if he just had a bit at the beginning like "Hey you guys, the first comic was a while ago but just so you know this is the second one", but instead it's literally just most of the first comic before we get to the new content. It's more like an update then a sequel. And really, did Exoplanet Names need either? I understand there's been a new NASA thing going on (and I already set up my name to go to Mars), but the joke about stupid names for planets has already been made, who was asking for an expansion back to a list comic?

Also, why are some of the red names integrated with the black ones? The colors should be segregated. It's not like the names are actually in references to anything about the planet, you can switch any of the names around and the comic doesn't suffer at all. Mixing the red and black just makes this comic more annoying to read for people who don't want to reread the first set.

Also also, this comic contains the fourth reference to The Spice Girls in a hundred comics or so, including yesterday's (which was also a sequel). Is it supposed to be a running gag? I don't get it.


In other news, I was all set to link to my review of the original Exoplanet Names and just add some additional commentary, until that plan was foiled by the fact that XKCD Isn't Funny hadn't started when the original went up and wouldn't for another fifty comics or so. Damn past me, damn him to hell.

(Friend Jon Levi was still reviewing comics back then, though; his take is right over here)

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1554 - Spice Girls

Okay, I can kinda see the first four panels being a decent bit on like, Friends or something like that, with the vocal inflections and the facial expressions to help the joke along. The words would need to be changed though, the pacing's wrong: instead of "Hearing Spice, Vision Spice..." and so on, adding "Spice" after every word, it should just be "Hearing, Vision, Smell, Touch, and Taste" delivered all in one breath. Slowing down the punchline makes it less funny, the joke should hit the audience all at once, like a kick or headbutt or some other sudden impact.

I'd also say to cut it after the forth panel. My reading is that at that point she's fed up with the game or whatever it is, and she's essentially insulting him, giving a semi-offensive wrong answer instead of the more jokingly wrong ones she gave previously. Bald should, in turn, get more visibly annoyed, instead of just stating the obvious "You're not even trying". Instead, we get words that sound like the spice girls' names, which is just lame. It's not like she's got the one name she remembers and then she loses steam, which might work. It looks like she's just saying random words.

The fact that this is a continuation of #1417 is confusing too, since it gives this comic a context in which groups of the same number are easily confused, which makes the reader see Hair as trying and failing the whole way through rather than not trying until the end.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1549 - XKCD Phone 3

Today someone told me I was prettier than Bailey Jay and I was all like "Fuck yeha, my day has been made!" and then I see this comic and snakes started physically manifesting in my home.

I've already talked about this comic twice! Why does a third one exist! Of all the XKCDs that could have been tripled, why couldn't it have been one of the good ones? I legitimately wouldn't have minded if #1533 had been repeated, since it has a deadpan, almost hypnotic quality that holds up well in the face of repetition, much like a Spiritualized song.

Imagine if instead of this, we'd gotten four more panels of Beret just sitting there. It'd be a good callback, suddenly we'd all realize he's still sitting there from before! And then maybe in the third appearance of the antique factory we could get all existential or whatever and show him quietly crying that he's stuck with such a boring, thankless job.

Instead we get the third appearance of The XKCD Phone. "We made another one!" proclaims the comic. "Yes, but why?" the reviewer begs, "Why, oh why, oh why?".

I had my friend Gillian take a look at this one. She calls it "lame and kinda like try hard" and adds "it feels like one of those tumblr posts that ends in like 'potter heads get your wants' like that sort of vibe". If you don't know what she's talking about, you're a lucky person. Never get a tumblr, it's hell.

Possibly the worst part (aside from the fact that Hitler existed) is that every one of these lines could have been a genuinely amusing aside in some larger joke. Like it's kind of a funny idea that something like part of a phone was foretold by prophecy, but combined with all the other 'punchlines' (scare quotes!) we just end up with a confusing, unfocused lump. We still have not truly moved the overall punchline past "What if a phone was just really shitty?".

This is the type of comic that really makes me want to stop, more than people being MEAN :'( to me in the comments could ever even dream. It really makes me realize how repetitive and pointless this is, and how really I might as well be Beret at his antique factory.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1542 - Scheduling Conflict

Maybe I should do like CinemaSins and just ring a bell every time the same problem happens. Like "Ding! Could be a tweet. Ding! Unoriginal joke."

And this totally is one of the worst examples of both. Like if I was a reviewer that did a lot of swearing and angry, this would be a review to give Mark Reads Twilight a run for its money.

The comic is five words. Don't let the "NSCC 2015" under the headline fool you! That might as well be those scribbles meant to represent text, it has no impact on the (unoriginal, goddamn boring) joke. Even if it was a tweet, it'd be sub-par.

The joke is a worse version of that old joke "The procrastination club's first meeting keeps getting postponed", which, although old, is funny because it has a self referentialness to it. The procrastination club's meeting is being postponed because they are putting it off, or procrastinating. With this comic, we do not know why the national scheduling conflict championships have been canceled. We can assume it's because there were scheduling conflicts, but we don't know that. It could have been because it's a stupid thing to hold a championships for. If that was the reason listed in the comic, that would have been funnier, because it would have subverted the reader's expectation that it was canceled because of scheduling conflicts. Changing the kind of championships that's canceled doesn't change the joke; "Kickboxing Championships Canceled" has the exact same impact on the reader.

I understand that people have bad days, days where they're just not "on". I wouldn't expect anyone to have constant A-game. Even Mike Oldfield, the greatest person who will ever exist, once played a wrong note*. But this comic is just crap. It's clear just from looking at it that very, very little thought and effort went into it, and I find that disappointing.



*On The Orchestral Hergest Ridge, during his classical guitar solo, but that was only because he'd had a day full of interviews and could only do one take and had never played classical guitar or been conducted before.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1521 - Sword In The Stone

I'm finding it very hard to suspend my disbelief for someone having access to Wikipedia and also needing to look up "England". Explainxkcd argues that The Chosen One is just looking through England's history (ha! like any country other than America has 'history'), but I disagree in this case, given the absence of a panel where she's going "hmm" or something to that effect. It looks more like just she doesn't want the responsibility, rather than being frightened off by all the ways English monarchs have died.

This is also one of the rare occasions where I think color would have lent the comic something. A beam of light is shining down on The Chosen One and a heavenly voice is coming down, I'd have used some yellow for those. I know he's going for the 'mystical' look, but I think that it being in light gray while the rest is in black just makes it look background and unimportant, a la #838. In color, it'd be bolder, more suited to something that parallels the voice of God so obviously.

Continuing backwards, the premise is also lacking in originality. Lots of Chosen Ones have refused the call over the years. That's even the second step of the typical hero's journey. My personal favorite example is Triangle, from Triangle And Robert.

Speaking of those music notes in the third panel, I just released a new album, consisting predominantly of music, which you can (as usual) buy for a price of your choice or stream/download it for free. Go listen to it! It has my vocals on two tracks!

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1508 - Operating Systems

This is a joke that I do not know enough about computers to understand. I just saw something called "Blood Drone" and I have to admit that attracted most of my attention.

You can only imagine my disappointment when I checked my dutiful and loyal sidekick, explainxkcd, and found that it was a development hell joke. Haven't we used all of them up by now, what with the finally released Chinese Democracy, Duke Nukem Forever, My Bloody Valentine's third full length album, and The Avalanches' second- oh wait

This is just a very easy joke to make, and it can be made in a lot of different ways and about a lot of different subjects, so I find it hard to comprehend why Randy decided to present it this way. Why not do it on a more popularly known subject, or ramp up the scale a lot. I vaguely remember getting pleasantly caught by surprise by a lesson on how the universe will progress before heat death happens.* At the end it added on "[X] is finally released". That didn't feel copied because it improved so much on the concept, like a cover that blows away the original song.

Ah, memories of better jokes. Good times. Goooooooooooooood tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimes.


*There's a wikipedia page for "timeline of the far future" which includes such things. Don't read it. It gets depressing fast.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1503 - Squirrel Plan

I remember this joke from back when I was six and it was about moths wanting to go to the sun. It made more sense then, too: Moths are attracted to really big bright things, unlike squirrels (generally).

Seriously, it's the same joke. Except worse, because it doesn't make as much sense.

I understand that some jokes are just easy to make and that certain pieces of comedy are going to be similar to each other for various reasons, but this is a rehash of a really, really simple joke that kids think up on their own. It's especially obvious when the usual stick figures are swapped out for animals, which has never happened before.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1418 - HORSE

Well, the readers have spoken (by the way, thank you all for feeding my fragile ego), you're gonna get a review for every single XKCD that happens from now on, regardless of the circumstances. Woo!

The first thing that jumped out at me when reading this comic was that it was essentially a rerun of #1031, but with worse art.

Before I started this blog, I did click through the archives of xkcdsucks and xkcd-sucks, both to see what running an XKCD hateblog would entail and for the entertainment value. The thing I noticed when I was reading them was that they tended to be much less leniant on originality than I am. For instance, Gamer_2k4 criticized #1393 for using the same premise as a lot of other comics, while I (geez that's a terrible review, it barely explains my position at all) praised it for taking an old concept in a new direction.

There's another example I can think of, but can't find the actual post, where Carl said that two comics that both centered around an innocent mistake resulting in large consequences, which to me seems like decrying an entire section of comedy tropes.

So I do feel a little hypocritical when I look at this comic and say "What? That's it? He just changed the words he was using in his browser text replacement." and it does take a bit of mental self-justification.

For one, the entire joke remains the same. 'I replaced word A with word B, now sentences with word A seem like they're about word B and it's funny because the sentences look absurd.'. That idea, just by itself, reminds me of the hilariously badly written, typo-ridden fanfiction that people like The Holy Cabbage would do dramatic readings of. More to the point, what has been changed from #1031 to #1418 aside from the words? It's the exact same plot, just with a different starting point. Actually, since #1031 showed the screen he was reading, this version of the joke actually has less detail in it.

Explainxkcd points out that the joke is also the same in #1004 and #1288, and I'd really like to bring everyone's attention to the latter of those two. It's just a list of these things; common words that, when changed to other words, make sentences look silly. And really, when you've made a list of varients on the same joke, why even bother continuing with it? You've already admitted you're just repeating the same idea.

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1415 - BALLOONING

I legitimately dislike reviewing this type of comic. There's only so many ways it's possible to say "This isn't original, like, at all. This has been done to death." before it starts becoming hypocritical.

(There's also the fact that the last time I made a "This is so old and overdone." type review, I lost half my readership, but I know that's my own damn fault.)

Honestly, I'm already having trouble thinking of other things to say. This joke's been done, many, many times. "What if Spider-Man acted like a spider?" And that's it.

Kinda weird that he called the comic "Ballooning" when the joke really has nothing to do with ballooning. I can see why he wouldn't call it "Spider-Man", because it'd spoil the joke, but why "Ballooning" of all things?