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Comment by mquander | Hacker News Reader

I think XKCD is sophomoric, but this is largely just of godawful quality.

The blonde girl calls megan’s boyfriend and convinces him to make some delicious nachos. However, he doesn’t know that the blonde girl’s real motive was to kill megan’s wifi signal with the microwave he uses because they were playing a first person shooter video game against each other over the internet, and the blonde girl wanted to kill her.

If you're going to write something scathing about how foolish thing X is, you had better make damn well sure your writing is actually better than thing X. This reads like a bright 12-year-old posted it (but not that bright.)

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The explanations of the jokes are funny because they're not funny. You see, you'd normally expect explanations of jokes to be funny. But these explanations are not funny. That's what makes the whole thing funny.

thanks Alex. it's really not that hard guys.

"You see, you'd normally expect explanations of jokes to be funny."

Who would expect that? It's a old cliche that explaining a joke isn't funny or entertaining. I certainly wasn't expecting humor when I looked at it.

(Nor did I find any, but then, the "it's funny because it's not funny" shtick is right up there with "Bill Clinton is a horny guy, amirite?" jokes in Dated Gag Heaven.)

Well, there is an interesting effect. Some of the jokes in XKCD are so bad that explaining them dryly has the unintended consequence of making them funnier. For example, http://bit.ly/UiiM5.

Not really. It's just "unfunny" and "uninteresting description of unfunny".

Now, if there were an additional level of description, something could be salvaged.

"The writer of the explanation characterizes a 'full rugby uniform' as lacking any trousers, belt, or shoes to invoke homophobic stereotypes about the English."

...Meh, maybe not even that would help.

Except they aren't very funny, and in quite a few cases completely wrong.

Would you prefer something more like http://xkcdexplained.tumblr.com/post/226305334/the-box-on-th... ?

Not really. I hope I'm not being overly critical, but "a weary customer" is pretty purple prose, and "intelligent enough to be aware of its affect" -- "affect?" C'mon. "Effect."

If this were some other kind of writing, like a forum post or a blog entry, no problem, stuff like that wouldn't faze me. But I think you have to clear a high bar in quality if you're writing some sarcastic & condescending criticism of something else... especially when the "something else" is already aiming at a (relatively) highbrow audience. Otherwise it's not credible to me and not funny.

Not deliberately purple, I suspect: substituting "weary" for "wary" is a pretty common mistake.

In that particular case, you missed the joke, so no.

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