OK, that sort of makes sense, I guess.
I’d say it’s more clever than funny, but that’s xkcd for you.
Okay, poetic feet hadn’t occurred to me. I was thinking the linguist reference might mean that the apparent nonsense lines she was saying might be homonyms for lines in another language. Like “jet am” sounding like “je t’aime”.
I knew that one was going to confuse people. It took me a few minutes.
Note that each phrase is written in a different foot. “Story water paper doorway” all have a strong syllable followed by a weak one. “Disarm Adele’s giraffe grenade” is the other way around. “Strawberry scorpion poetry” is strong-weak-weak. And IIRC, “anapest” is the name of a foot.
Specifically weak weak strong.
Yup. That site is like reading Cliff Notes rather than Moby Dick. You get all the info, but none of the impact. The writers seem particularly humorless; I wonder if it’s intentional.
I use it when I don’t understand a reference or am missing the cue, and it’s very helpful, but dreadfully deadpan. Even their explanations of why it’s funny are frequently off-target. A lot of Randall’s humor revolves around ambiguities with a wink and a nod and allowing you to draw various conclusions, and they don’t seem to get that. Instead, they say in several paragraphs what could be said in a sentence. I didn’t check it for the poetic meter one above, but all they should need to say is “It’s a play on the word ‘foot’, which is an aspect of poetic meter.”
Even that shouldn’t be necessary; if you don’t know what “anapest” is you could google it and bingo (and if you do know what it is but didn’t get the joke at first, the clouds should part as you read the hovertext).