Humour about the Equipment

Here's my take on XKCD: Once upon a time in a land far away, there lived a king who was a vainglorious peacock. He spent vast sums of money on his wardrobe, and spent more time then he should have consulting with tailors, cobblers, seamstresses and the like. One day two con-artists presented themselves to him as magic tailors from far away. They claimed to the king that they had created a fabric with a wonderful quality. It had, they claimed, the ability to appear invisible to people of shall we say not high moral standings. The king asked to see this cloth, and the con-artists then mimed pulling out a bolt of cloth, pretending they were holding the fabric in question. The king, not wanting to appear low, immediately enthused over the quality of the cloth and commissioned robes of state from the false tailors for a large sum of money.

Once the tailors 'finished' their work, they bade the king strip to his undergarments so they could drape the robes about his person. The king then pronounced he would undertake a royal procession through his city, so all the people would admire his new clothes, and also, root out the bad eggs in his kingdom. He then set out on his procession, clad only in his underwear. The people on his parade route murmured in appreciation of the king's finery, themselves not wanting to appear base and low. Just then, a little boy stuck his head out of the crowd and said:

XKCD is a overrated mess of stick figures making math jokes. The problem is that creator Randall Munroe set himself a premise wherein the characters make increasingly obscure math, science, and computer programming jokes. To the presumed amusement of people who have interest in those disciplines. I like to imagine some drone who works with Excel spreadsheet programs crossing his fingers and hoping Randall will make a strip about Excel spreadsheets next time. Because XKCD's humor is based on making increasingly obscure references to scientific disciplines, Randall's setups become more convoluted, and the comedic payoff becomes less rewarding. "Geek" humour shares a quality with 'Stoner' humor in that it's jokes about the equipment. For instance, in an old 'Cheech and Chong' routine, a stoner is on a satirical game show where he's asked, 'How many joints are in a lid?' The stoner replies 'Two." If you're a pot smoker from the 70's, it's a funny gag in that you presumably buy lids of pot that contain from four to a dozen joints. (I've never heard the term 'Lid' used in that context in twenty years. Yeah, I've smoked pot. Wanna hang out and discuss Hesse's Siddhartha and make plans to visit next year's Burning Man festival?)

Where the Emperor's New Clothes metaphor comes in is in the implication that if you don't like XKCD, it's because you're too stupid to get XKCD. I don't think this was Randall's attempt to 'critic-proof' his comic strip, but the implication is still there. "I get the gags in XKCD, and therefore, I'm part of the tribe. People who don't like it are too stupid because their tiny Neanderthal brains can't wrap their head around the profound concepts described therein." The problem with this line of thought, besides it coming from a geek asshole, is that in this day and age, one can simply Google an obscure reference in order to 'get' it. My point is, if one has to go through all this effort for a stick-figure comic, why even bother in the first place?

I wouldn't be so hard on XKCD if Randall displayed some acuity in his drawing. While using stick figures and pie charts and graphs and actuarial tables to illustrate a joke are all well and good, Randall's limited drawing skills constrict his jokes, so if he needs those tools in his toolbox, they aren't there for him to use, so he has to abandon a gag that he wants to tell on account of it'll demand a level of draughtsmanship he simply doesn't have access to. Eventually, he'll get to the point where he'll have to make a multi-page observation tying in the writing of Douglas Hofstader with Xeno's paradox and throw in Fibonacci's equation,... and the punchline will be.."A dog wearing a hat." or something equally banal. Then he'll be making 'shaggy dog' jokes until his comic drops out of favor, then he'll abandon the whole enterprise.

Look, to illustrate my point, here's a comic by Kate Beaton:



And here's an unfair but accurate rendering by me in the style of Randall Munroe:


While the XKCD pastiche works as a gag, it's clearly inferior to the original Beaton strip. While Beaton's line has a very sparse, sketchy quality, she manages to convey a world of intent in it. (God, I love that look of sarcastic disdain Rose gives her co-workers in that third panel!) When you reduce everything in the comic to a stick figure, there's layers of narrative within a gag that you just will not have access to. Also, Beaton's main source of humor is history, and the stories she tells have a funny, literate quality to them. So you learn something instead of having your insider's knowledge of computers or math stroked.