1857

Truly, there is nothing funnier than watching one person try to write two people riffing on an idea that wasn't funny in the first place.

1856

Golly, mathematicians are such a wacky bunch! You didn't think they spent all that time doing boring proofs for nothing, did you?

I love the teacher's fist throughout this. There's no good way to draw extremities on a stick figure: hands and feet are necessarily at a much greater level of detail than the rest of the body. A better cartoonist would have foreseen this as a problem and figured out a way around it, either by writing or drawing differently. Randall, being a hack, decided instead to just put these adorable weird blotches at the end of the teacher's arm. This is reminiscent of 1544, where we get this weird attempt to convey a sense of gravity by dramatically zooming in on the blank, expressionless circle-face of a stick person.

The post-punchline dialogue in the last panel is atrocious, too. No joke is ever improved by appending crappier backup jokes.

1855

Don't worry, everyone; I'm sure Randall actually knows the point of fancy camera attachments isn't just to get your lens physically closer to your subject. Judging by the thunderously bad alt-text, it seems this is meant to be taken entirely at face value, and there really isn't anything more to this than "lol expensive camera parts are big".

When I first looked at this, I thought the webcam was attached to the outside, but now it looks sort of grey, like it's supposed to represent a cutaway view? I guess that makes sense-- it could maybe be clearer that the insides of all those lenses are empty space, but I can't even blame Randall for not putting more effort into the art servicing this joke.

1854

Wouldn't it be hilarious if there was a keyboard shortcut to reset the whole internet? It would have to be, like, really complicated to make sure no one did it by accident.

1853

There's a fundamental misapprehension at work here regarding the nature and purpose of the news. For something to be reported as a news story, it has to be something which is assumed not to be common knowledge. Things everyone already does are not news by definition, so they don't get reported. The very concept of news implies a body of commonly known things which the news can add to by virtue of being outside it. This, believe it or not, is how the benefits of Actual Scientific Research on things like the value of aspirin or red wine get disseminated to the grunting masses of non-/r/-science subscribers who don't read XKCD, but Ayn Randall over here never feels truly alive unless he's telling himself he's superior to the great mass of sheep.

Besides all of which, this doesn't actually sound like a bad lifestyle. Maybe he should give it a try, seeing as how he's starting to get on in years himself.

1852

The White House Correspondents' Dinner is sometimes described as a "nerd prom". This description is both cringeworthy and grotesque, because it's meant to sound self-deprecatory while it's actually a means of basking in the social cachet that comes with membership in the White House Correspondents' Association. Randall likes to do this a lot, where he makes it look like knowing about science presents all these tiresome yet wacky obstacles to functioning in everyday society. At the same time, there's a subtextual assertion of superiority: he isn't wrapped up in anything so banal as election results, because he's been busy pondering the LAWS OF SCIENCE. He has carefully posted this as far from an election as possible, to make it extra clear that he is in no way beholden to the political cycles that dominate the lives of you lesser beings.

At least there's some attempt at art in it? It's the first one to have color since 1845.

1851

Everything about this comic is pointless.The drawing is broadly pointless, because it doesn't tell us anything that isn't made obvious by the caption it's supposed to be setting up. The guy saying "Ah, yes, of course" is specifically pointless, because he obviously doesn't understand what the blonde stick figure is saying. Megan's presence is also pointless, unless we are to read her silence as stupefaction at the merciless imbecility of her friends, slowly giving way to the fear that she is reaching a point in her life where the possibility of leaving them behind in hopes of finding better relationships begins to diminish. This entire misbegotten attempt at observational humor is pointless, because the general public is only infrequently called upon to make decisions that require more than a superficial familiarity with magnetohydrodynamics (if, however, you find yourself in this situation often, consult this article). Randall would be a lot happier if he didn't constantly feel this bizarre urge to pretend he's a scientist.

1850

Randall long ago resolved never to show something funny happening when he could tell you about it instead.

What's with the weird consistency in the leg-positions of the stick people here? Some kind of hidden message?

Is this part of a series on Megan becoming progressively more exasperated with her idiot friends?

1849

Again, this is weirdly dated. This is something people have been talking about since the 1990s (which will soon be 30 years ago, Randall!), and this comic adds exactly nothing to the idea. There might be an interesting point to be made here about the increasing fluidity of popular culture since the internet took off in the 1990s, resulting in a failure of the generational zeitgeist to coagulate as it did in the past, but I don't really have time to go into it, since I have a job the requires more than 15 minutes' worth of effort every week. Randall, who has no such excuse, simply opted instead to point out yet again that time continues to pass. Check back in 2023 for "it's been 30 years since Jurassic Park you guys".

1848

lol the stick person said "fuck"

1847

Actual scientists don't have this problem, because they are not stupid. Normal people don't have this problem either, because they don't waste time reading what amount to very specialized trade publications (that's why they're called "journals"). It is only Randall Munroe and the rest of the /r/science subscribers who are smart enough to feel like maybe they really should be reading the primary scientific literature, not smart enough to comprehend it, but still conceited enough to preen about how precocious they are for looking up the National Academy of Sciences on Wikipedia.

1846

I guess drones have gotten mainstream enough that owning one makes you a suitable target for Randall's disdain, rather than a Hip Geek (TM) on the cutting edge of technology. This sudden obsession with shooting down drones is the result of Randall's reflexive hipster-sense passing its critical point.

This is also another example of Randall's tedious habit of undermining his jokes in an attempt to provide irony. It's like he read somewhere that humor is in the subversion of expectations and made that the biggest item on his comic-writing checklist. Megan-wants-to-shoot-drones and people-can't-fly-drones are two separate ideas here that don't really need to be in the same comic (Are you listening, Randall? You could have gotten almost a whole week's worth of comics out of this, but you blew it on Monday!).

1845

This is so terrible Randall couldn't even summon up the energy to draw the border between New Hampshire and Maine:

But whatever, as long as he gets to pretend he's educating you about hidden truths of statistics.

1844

The thought that there might exist real people who think this is funny makes me physically sick.