1102: Black hats on sale

Alt-text: I lead a small but extraordinarily persuasive religion whose only members are door-to-door proselytizers from other faiths.

I love how today's comic came out just three strips after 1099, since this is basically Mr. Hat's response to that one. So what exactly is Mr. Hat's character? Is he a murderous sociopath, or just kind of a dick? Neither, actually, since as I wrote in the last review, there is no single Mr. Hat. The black hat itself is just a prop that signifies a character trait, in this case that the person wearing it is "not a very nice people". So yeah. There are no recurruing characters in xkcd, no matter what anybody says.

The comic itself deals with a common criticism of one of the claims made by, ahem, a certain lawsuit-happy "religion" based in the Wang of America. And that is also its biggest flaw. The comic just reiterates an argument against something without adding anything to the discussion. It is absolutely unnecessary and not at all funny. Plus I think the argument has been floating around the Internet for a long time. Yeah, I'm adding the "dated reference" tag.

The alt-text is kinda amusing, if divorced from the comic and presented as an out-of-context joke line. Like a bash.org entry, I'd say.

Well, this was short, but hey, it's not like I haven't already said all of this in previous reviews. We really need a glossary of xkcd's recurring flaws instead of the review blog format...

1099: You do realize that anybody can buy a beret, right?

Alt-text: Try our bottomless drinks and fall forever!

Today's joke is a play on the term "endless wings". For those of you who don't know and are unable to use Google, "endless wings" is a promotion by the Hooters restaurant (and probably other places as well) where you pay some amount of money and then may eat as many chicken wings as you can stomach. Now, someboy could make the observation that "endless" means the same thing as "infinitely long" and draw a comic about that, but who would go with such an obvious and thought-less joke? Oh, right...

Besides, why would Beret Guy even have infinitely long wings? Is it because he's a mutant? Or the last member of a long lost race? No, it's because Randall thought up a joke that nobody else would find funny. And because the idea was kind of wacky and non-sensical, he just slapped Beret Guy in it without any sense of reason.

We have been led to believe that even though all other characters are basically one-shots with similar hair styles, Beret Guy is the same man in every strip. Now that I think back to it, though, I don't think there has ever been any indication of this in the comic itself. And that makes sense. Why is Beret Guy's (and Mr. Hat's, for that matter) character so inconsistent? Because it's not the same character. Beret Guy is every Cloudcuckoolander in xkcd-land. The beret is not an indication of the character, it's an indication of the chracteristic. Mr. Hat is not one guy who is a kind of a dick. Mr. Hat is every guy who is kind of a dick. It is laziness of the highest caliber, equal to declaring "everybody who wears glasses is a brainiac" and just expecting the audience to run with it.

It is laziness that is Randall Munroe's biggest sin. He is capable of drawing beautiful landscapes, detailed vehicles and even recognizable human beings, but he creates a stick comic because otherwise he'd have to put work into drawing it. He often goes with half-assed, unfunny jokes, because otherwise he'd have to put work into writing them. He never grows as an artist, because that means challenging himself, i.e. work. Randall Munroe's laziness is the reason why xkcd sucks.

----

P.S.: There haven't been any reviews for a long time, because even if I do usually find something to say about a comic, I can't muster up any energy to write a review, especially since all I really need to do is point at some past reviews and say "these things that were wrong with the past comics are wrong with this comic, too". I have come to the conclusion that xkcd isn't really conductive to the "strip by strip review" blog format and that it would be more effective to just create a wiki that would mainly focus on the many, many flaws of the comic (see the tag list on this blog) - something like Rob's Rants on the non-hyphenated cousin.

1086: It's not a comic until you draw something worth looking at.

Alt-text: Ooh, another one. Uh ... the ability to alter any coefficients of friction at will during sporting events.

Oh come on! This isn't even a comic. How far up your ass does your head have to be to think that to be labelled a comic, all your creation needs to be is made by hand in a drawing program?

Yep, it's another one of those and I guess it's my duty to demonstrate how this execution is the single worst one that Randall could've chosen. First, it is essentially a dumb joke about meta-wishes (who hasn't made one of those?) interspersed with shotgun humor, and as we all know by now, neither is funny, especially when done by xkcd. The shotgun wishes especially could be used as setups for a series of comics, depicting the effects of said wishes, but no, all we get is a list of ideas.

What really ruins the comic for me is the format. Presuming the existence of a magical wish-granting bureau is a) something so typically xkcd, and b) a dead horse already. You could've drawn this as a log of a clinically insane man and you wouldn't even have to change anything except for the header.

Also, including a picture of Mr. Hat in the log does not count as featuring a recurring character.

1084: What is this I don't even

Hey everyone! Sexy Online Retcon Critiquing Funnies Sometimes (SoRCFS) here after a long absence/silent lurking to pop back into my favorite stick-figure-based-webcomic criticism community hosted on Google Blogger.

Since I'm not yet over to criticizing the most recent Xkcd, I think I should also take up some space thanking the other authors of this blog for posting far more frequently than I have. Props especially to T-Jack for finding things to say about comics that are hard to criticize because they're more Garfield-level bland than actually bad. Regarding my own lack of posts: while I want to blame it on some things (including getting my own comics published semi-professionally). Really, though, I can always find time to complain about things. I think it's that aforementioned blandness that's kept me from really trying to write anything. No strips really riled me up the way I reacted to, say, 972 or 980.

UNTIL NOW.

So now I'm going to write something obscenely long in an attempt to A) make up for almost 90 strips (30 weeks!) since my last post, and B) clarify the things that I as a published cartoonist think are wrong with this strip.

So! After that long and tedious header that 50% of all you Hypenators (which is to say, 3 people) skipped, here we go:

Title: Server Identity; Alt: Protip: Annoy Ray Kurzweil by always referring to it as the 'Cybersingularity'.

I think humor's a weird thing. What is funny varies between contexts, cultures, and levels of dignity. On the other hand, there's still some sort of science, system or what have you about how funny things are delivered. Stand-up comedians, for example, probably that it's plain out dumb to try getting your joke out while the audience is still in the middle of their pretty consistently-timed laughter. In most cases, it's better to wait for the audience to calm down instead of fighting them while trying to deliver the next part of the routine. I'm pretty sure there are conventions that dominate good joke delivery, the unsurprisingly simple explanation for that being that said conventions work.

One thing I've observed with great interest in this entire system is the role of referential humor. You know the type: you crack a joke to your friends and it's only funny because of how Fluttershy ate Edward Cullen in the season 8 finale of Smallville. Or something like that. Basically, the kind of joke where the receivers need to know some pop culture (or, even worse, the in-jokes of a social group,) to actually find it funny. Failure to understand referential jokes followed by puzzlement and, occasionally an understanding party's attempt to explain the joke.

And then you turn purple and lose the ability to hold newspapers.

Generally speaking, I think these jokes are less humorous. While I'm pretty sure there's no serious metric out there for measuring how funny things are, but it's an objective fact that parts of pop culture fall in and out of the public eye pretty quickly. This effect has only gotten more pronounced in the age where computers are connected by a series of tubes. As such, people looking at a joke based on referential humor from the past will often throw a proverbial nullPointerException and fail to understand the joke. Cue the lack of humor.

A textbook example (if you could cram this stuff in credited college courses) would be the Disney movies Treasure Planet and Chicken Little. I'm pretty sure that Chicken Little totally trumped the spacified Stevenson story in raw box office numbers. On the other hand, Chicken Little was basically Disney trying to be Dreamworks and cramming their movies full of pop culture=based referential jokes. As such, it hasn't aged nearly as well as Treasure Planet or any other film in the Disney Animated Canon.

So, where have I been going with these last 4 paragraphs and single caption? Basically, 1084 relies pretty heavily on referential humor. In fact, it's so heavy that it not only kills the humor, it is capable of yanking out of the comic any person who is not privvy to the three or so different things that were running through Randall's mind at the time. Which, as I have so cleverly determined from my totally unbiased test population of me, me, and the first few people to post on the forums, is most people.

Here's my list of referential jokes or parts that lead up to jokes, in order of increasing severity. Surprisingly, (or maybe not) they ascend with the panel number and the intended humor.

• Panel 2- "~#ls": I'm going to assume that's a server command or some Linux thing that falls outside the purview of my personal nerdiness. Since Xkcd panders to a tech-savvy crowd I think the audience would come to basically the same conclusion I did, which is that whatever the long haired character is doing probably leads to the stuff in panel 3. This is only a problem for those of an over-curious mind.
• Panel 3- all that crap: As far as I can tell, the joke of this comic is that the guy was trying to do something ridiculously convoluted on mutually exclusive platforms (Adobe and Android don't like each other, from what I hear). While the specifics of the joke are somewhat esoteric, I think that the intended audience and increasingly tech-savvy world should contribute a little to a better understanding of it. Failing that, there's a much simpler joke of "holy crap this is so idiotically complex" which most people should get
• Tooltip- Ray Kurzweil: I'm not sure exactly how obscure the singularity mentioned below is, but I know about it and not this guy (who is apparently a futurist). Somehow I doubt that referencing an obscure author involved with this obscure theory is a great way to make something funny.
• Panel 4- the singularity: The technological singularity is some obscure futurist theory about how technology will become infintely complex or something at some point in time (if you actually know the theory proper and bother trying to correct me, I'm totally going to laugh at you and not correct this post). Anyway, the theoretical comical payoff (the second one, really,) comes from the idea that this guy is so bad at computers that he would be better off waiting til computers are smart enough to correct his idiocy. This is pretty bad, because if you have to look up what the singularity is then you've just been pulled out of the comic and been distracted from the already confusing humor of panel 3. If you do manage to get the joke, then it still feels like post punchline dialog because of how it goes on longer than any witty retort really should.

So yeah. That's my bit on the problems with referential humor and analysis of how it detracts from the comic. While I feel that pop culture references can be put to good use as background easter eggs (check out what Disney's up to right now), what Randall did with this strip was rely far too heavily on them and have inappropriate faith that his readers would know what the hell was going on. What we're left with is an ineffective comic that makes sub-savvy readers stop reading it to understand what's going on.

Long story short: Randall's inability to actually bother with the flow of reading the comic is something that makes me want to write long rants and after I'm done with that, drop the name of this blog as a simple statement: Xkcd sucks.
 

That post was depressingly long. Here's a kitten to cheer you up!

1082: Cartoon sex is not an adequate substitute for the real thing.

Alt-text: That's a gneiss butte.

This one will be short, mostly because I'm not a geologist and I'd mainly like to confirm whether what the sticks say in the comic makes any sort of sense. Remember, Randy is not a geologist, either, and his knowledge of the subject has probably come from Wikipedia.

So geology has a few terms that, to a layman, might sounds as some sort of double innuendo. So what does Randall do? Why, make a sex joke about it, of course! First off, ew, and second, how desperate do you have to be that a couple of technical terms will turn you on? While at work?

Another "just dumb" comic. Not much to criticize or get angry about, but definitely not something that really needed to be put online.

1081: If you're arguing over the Internet, you've already lost.

Alt-text: Really, the comforting side in most conspiracy theory arguments is the one claiming that anyone who's in power has any plan at all.

Oh, those wacky conspiracy theorists. Aren't they all just so dumb? I mean, they believe some weird pages with inconsistent text style more than our beloved Wikipedia and then they call everybody who doesn't agree with them "sheep".What is wrong with them?

In all seriousness, this is just another instance of Randall's "intellectual elitism" - anybody who believes something that I know isn't true is wrong and therefore stupid - and this is only aplified by a Randall stand-in being the one who "wins" the argument against a hairy loser. This actually makes me wonder how different this strip would be if the two stickmen's hairstyles were swapped. After all, since hair is only used in xkcd to differentiate between characters, it shouldn't matter who has what hairstyle. Right?

I feel confident in marking this review with the "no joke" tag, since the waterslide gag reads like Chris-chan's patented Random Access Humor (if you don't know what I'm talking about here, consider yourself lucky and don't, I repeat, don't search for any of that). When is Randall finally going to understand that non sequiturs are not funny on their own? Also, doesn't the hair in Panel 2 remind you of Doug from Scrubs?

Now that I think about it, there are many xkcd comics, in which the characters are doing this, which makes me wonder if it's a common thing to do for Randall. I believe that if you argue with every idiot you meet online, you probably aren't as smart as you think you are.

1074: Forgetting to title your blog posts is always a good idea

Alt-text: Ok, so Spirit and Opportunity are pretty awesome. And Kepler. And New Horizons, Cassini, Spirit and Opportunity, Curiosity, TiME, and Project M. But c'mon, if the Earth were a basketball, in 40 years no human's been more than half an inch from the surface.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Stick Figure #1 reads something on the internet and tells Stick Figure #2 about it. Stick Figure #2 comments on it with a you-wish-it-was snappy one-liner. Familiar? Gee, how could that be?

Remember when I said that Randall will never grow as an artist because he doesn't challenge himself? This is a classic sign of that. There are so many ways to make a comic about Something Someone Said On The Internet™, but he will hold on to the tired formula simply because it is easier than coming up with something new every time.

Not that the comic itself is much better on its own merits. All the usual flaws are here - walls of text with little to no action, post-punchline dialogue, you name it. I'd like to note that stick!Randall turns his chair around between panels 1 and 3, just so that he can be shown as facing Megan in the final panel. Apart from the obvious question of "Who does that?", this just shows why even stick figure comics need faces. So that they can look around without moving their whole body.

Some of you may be wondering why I said that the comic contains post-punchline dialogue. Isn't that "deorbited" line the punchline? Actually, no. I have to admit, I don't really get it (maybe because I'm not so well-versed in rocket science), but I get the feeling that even if I did, it still wouldn't be funny. No, the real punchline here is the first line in panel 3. On top of being geuinely funny (though that could be just because I'm a big fat jerk who likes to put everyone down), that line is what the strip is really about, as even the alt-text is building on it. Granted, the alt-text sucks, but the point still stands. I guess this comes to Randall trying hard to be funny and failing, and just being funny somewhere ese by accident.

So, yeah. This would be a great blog post material, but as a comic, it sucks.