Comic 813: Now With Less Context!

[ALT: "'Upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Flash to view THIS content, bitch.' ::triggers detanator::" Note that the spelling error is original. I have preserved the error with Webcite, and this image links to the original, non-corrected version. Also, in the future, it would be awesome if someone could try to do a Webcite of the comic as soon as it goes up and post it in the comments thread of the previous comic.

Hello, you rotten sociopaths. Did you have a good Hallowe'en, telling the trick-or-treaters they couldn't have any candy and that it would make them fat and ugly when they ate it and that they would die alone if they kept eating candy, thus making them cry and getting no fewer than three parents threatening to call the cops? Because Randy did not have fun. He was sitting at home, fantasizing about Megan as per usual, when suddenly he got really angry. After all those times he called her at 3 am offering to eat her out, she still didn't love him and still waved her restraining order in his face any time he tried to violate its terms! This was infuriating! So he drew a picture of a man shooting Megan, and everything was well again.

Then he incorporated it into a shittastic comic. It is, as I'm sure you can tell, a series of context-free one-liners. Of course, one-liners don't require a great deal of context, but these just amount to a series of "here's some hilarious nerdy and/or nostalgic references that make no sense! LOL WHAT COULD POSSIBLY HAVE LED TO SOMEONE SAYING THAT IN A MOVIE THIS IS SO HILARIOUS GUYS why won't you love me :((((("

This is Randy being true to form, of course. There's a graph, which isn't very accurate--I don't see any real reason for these to be in decreasing order of likelihood to appear in a movie. Some are terrible, some could almost be amusing in the right light, and this doesn't in any way correlate to their position on the graph. And the humor is derived mostly from the references.

• "You're going down the memory hole now, asshole." This one isn't particularly terrible, though it's also not in any way funny. It's a 1984 reference. I can perfectly envision an action movie where this line is played without any attempt at humor, and it wouldn't be the worst thing in the universe.
• "Hey! You forgot to carry the two!" What the fuck is this, Rainman? This is by far the worst of the bunch.
  
• "Looks like the fed just lowered the interest rate." See, this one I can see working really well in a movie. I vaguely entertained the notion of smiling at this one (and this one alone). I'm not giving Randy credit here since (a) he thinks this one is worse than the previous one and (b) he didn't actually create the context for it, but in a movie where the context is appropriate, this could be a pretty good deadpan one-liner.
  
• "Guess you should have scrolled ALL the way to the bottom before clicking 'Agree.'" This one is pretty terrible, but I'm envisioning a whole movie based on the premise of someone who didn't read the EULA all the way through, and by agreeing to it they become the protagonist of some cliche action movie with thugs on one side and the cops on the other. But if that is the context it actually makes this one-liner even worse, because that's basically just stating the premise of the movie.
  
• "Bangarang, motherfucker." I didn't recognize this as a reference to Hook at first, which I think is the only reason he thinks it's a bad one-liner? Otherwise it isn't any worse than "yippee-ki-yay" or however the fuck you spell that, and that one's goddamn famous. I mean, hell, it's already a battle cry in the movie it's referencing.
  
• "'Upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Flash to view THIS content, bitch.' ::triggers detanator::" This sounds less like a one-liner and more like the sort of joke that is still popular among my social circle, which is trying to take a harmless phrase and make it sound threatening by basically doing what he did just there. (Also, "I've got your updated content right here," said in a menacing way.) This one clearly doesn't work with any sort of context. It's just there to reference a common message people get who don't have Flash upgraded. Lame.
  

I always feel like this style of comic--the "list of jokes on a single theme that are otherwise unrelated" ones--is incredibly lazy, but it's Randy playing to his strengths. He is terrible at anything with pacing or structure--his setup is usually awful, he puts the joke in the wrong place, he throws in post-punchline dialog. But there's usually the core of a good joke in there that he ruins entirely with execution. With these he doesn't even try to execute the joke. He just throws the core out there and allows people with a bit of creativity to create their own joke. It's incredibly lazy and requires basically no talent to do, but it's clever in its own little way.

Also, does anyone notice that Randy is swearing a lot lately? I guess it's just three of the last four, but they say three is a trend, and by "they" I mean some random people who are mostly joking, I guess, maybe.

Finally, I stopped in to the forums to see what they thought! There is a lot of consensus that "bangarang" was the most awesome of the one-liners (because they got the reference, I am sure). There was some confusion as to why Randy thought it was the least likely to make it into a movie! But then some nerd managed to pull off the mental gymnastics necessary to believe that Randy is infallible even when he lists their favorite thing as his least favorite:

"I think that awesomeness is exactly why he believes it will never be said."

Fortunately the very next comment is saying he doesn't see why it's funny, and most of the other fans generally think he got the order wrong. Which, he really did. It just goes to show that Randall's idea of quality is so completely and utterly shot that it no longer has any correlation even with what his fanboys like.