Comic 542: bloody hell

I guess this is the eagerly awaited sequel to comic 515 or something like that. It suffers from the same problem, namely, no matter what else happens we just want to know what the blood is about, dammit. Anyway, I guess the idea is that you get someone to not look up by reverse psychologizing them and making it look like you are trying to trick them into looking up. Mildly clever, I suppose. A far better joke based on the "gullible on the ceiling" idea is when people actually write it on the ceiling (or actually black it out of a dictionary, or delete its wikipedia page, or something like that) and just leave it there.

Alt-text: you suck. You add nothing to this comic.

There needs to be a name for when you want to refer to something humorous, but rather than actually think of a funny thing event or something, you just refer to it vaguely in a way that implies that it was indeed funny or interesting. So for example: "Dear Jim, I would like to apologize once more for the terrible incident with the swordfish and the diapers. Rest assured that we are apologizing to local law enforcement and the newspapers are preparing corrections."

This comic is of course an example, as is this Dinosaur Comic. Actually, qwantz does it a lot, though I think that's a factor of the fact that they can't include a lot of stuff in the panels, what with their heavily prescribed art and all. Yesterday's comic's list of conferences Randy is banned from does it too: "ha ha WHAT how could he be banned from the dolphin conference i'll bet it was something WACKY." The time xkcd ruined christmas is a great example. This one too.

Barring another, better name, I am going to call this "The Randall Maneuver."
Update: Ok, as the commentors have told me, TVtropes refers to this as a "Noodle Incident" after a particularly well-known one from Calvin & Hobbes. ok so that's what we are calling them now. also: TVtropes = very distracting.