Comics 1023-1025: Xkcd Sucks Dot Tumblr Dot Com

Some reviews for you, including a very special guest review of 1025 by some cuddlefish named CrazyCod (coddlefish?).

1023. Some notes: first, Randy definitely wants you to know that he and his milk plant watch (watched?) Downton Abbey. This is important because last time he told you that he watches this popular British show on PBS he was intentionally getting the name wrong and you guys he was doing it to be funny.
This is one of the many XKCDs where I can see it being funny if it were written by someone who wasn't Randy. The execution is terrible--it reads like a pitch for a joke rather than an actual joke. I can see a number of webcomiceurs (or webcomiceusses) pulling it off. Randy didn't really try. He just described a scenario and said "wouldn't that be funny?

1024. It took me a while to realize that the pond wasn't supposed to be like a bunch of pacmen eating each other or something. I hear rumor that the fanboys think this is brilliant art instead of a passable "I guess you can tell this is supposed to be a pond and it's not fuck-off hideous" drawing.

1025.  [NB. the rest of this post is a guest review -Ed.]

Hello! I’m CrazyCod and I'm just now sending this review of Randy's latest comic-on-the-Internet to Rob (oh god i hope rob posts this i don’t want to have written it for nothing). Apparently, our collective sigh after 1024 turned out not to be a lame throwback to 1000 was loud enough that Randy picked up on it and decided to make 1025 even worse just to spite us.

 

So, let’s get straight to the point. Does 1025 have any comedic merit? I think it is pretty clear that it does not. There are several problems with the comic, the most important of which that it is simply not funny. Randy takes a hackneyed snowclone, which was arguably never funny to begin with, and substitutes it with another snowclone of his own creation. So, instead of “X would be a good name for a band”, we get “X.tumblr.com”! This is supposed to provoke hearty guffaws from the readers.

 

Well, given that my Internet habits revolve almost exclusively around xkcdsucks and assorted pornography, I thought that there might be a joke hidden in there that maybe I was just missing out on. Maybe, like certain bands that people worse than me would derisively attach the label “hipster” to, Tumblr blogs have long and pretentious names. As such, I travelled to the strange land of Tumblr in the hopes of understanding this comic. After navigating through the site’s utterly unintuitive design, I started reading through the blogs’ names, hoping to discover Randy’s source of inspiration. Even after browsing through the most pretentious of categories (I’m looking at you, Art and Film), I failed to find any blog names that were more than six words long, much less awkward, yet complete sentences about raccoon orgies.

 

And that brings us to another issue: the phrase “turns out some raccoons got in and were operating this, like, raccoon sex dungeon” is not funny! It's actually creepy and disgusting! I cannot fathom why anyone would think “that IS a good name for a band!” in the first place, much less make Randy’s mental substitution and think that it is a good name for a Tumblr blog. Most damning is that Randy could have used any other phrase for the “setup”, since the “punchline” works with any phrase whatsoever, but he chose to refer to raccoon orgies. Make of that what you will.

 

I’m not going to criticise the joke’s execution, because the joke itself is so bad that any execution would actually do it honour. The fact that there is a contemplative man saying “dot tumblr dot com” to a woman who is saying clearly inappropriate things to him doesn’t warrant a mention in the context of such a terrible joke. I would like to comment on the alt-text, however, that makes use of the deliciously self-referential idea that there could be a blog called (get this) dot tumblr dot com, because then its URL would be difficult to say out loud. Gee, Randy, that was hilarious when Slashdot did it, back in 1997.

 

I think you will agree with me when I say that a joke is less funny the more broadly applicable it is. As an example, take lightbulb jokes. Lightbulb jokes that can be applied to any group (how many republicans/democrats/whatever does it take to change a lightbulb just one but it doesnt matter they’ll never see the light anyway please like me guys) are infinitely less effective than lightbulb jokes play on a particular group’s characteristics and that wouldn’t work if said group was substituted with any other (how many kids with ADD would take to change a lightbulb HEY LET’S GO RIDE BIKES). Okay, that’s not a particularly funny example, but it gets the point across: change “kids with ADD” for “atheists” and the joke doesn’t work. Much like a friend to everybody is a friend to nobody, a joke that can accommodate any setup isn’t really a joke.