I don’t get it. Is this just a straight out swipe at Romney (“the things Romney says are as silly as things said by a character in a children’s book”) or is there some deeper joke or satire or comment going on here?
And it’s freaking hilarious. He hit on exactly what I thought as I read the original.
Which is what? I’m still not getting it. The Mad version is funny because it’s actually hard to tell in some cases whether it is Romney or Burns, but the xkcd version it’s obvious.
Yeah, the xkcd attempt fails. It might have been salvageable if the last item on the list, at least, had been ambiguous, but on the list of fictional characters that have some commonality with Mitt Romney, Charlie Bucket is in approximately ten millionth place.
That’s the joke. Famous fictional rich guy is very similar to Romney. Famous fictional poor kid is in no way similar to Romney.
Agree its not exactly hilarious though (and Randal’s been going a little overboard with the obscurity thing lately. I don’t think the original cartoon was particularly widespread).
I always figured in telling a non-sequitor joke, the key was quickness - make your incongruous statement, get your laugh, move on. By actually going to the trouble of digging up twelve quotes, Munroe takes a barely-chucklable idea and not only beats the dead horse, but dismembers it and hangs the body parts up in widely-spread horse cities to strike terror across a multitude of horse nations.
Wow. He better hope one of those parts doesn’t wind up in Vaes Dothrak, or he’ll be in really deep shit.
Yeah, but you go back a few days to this and get astounded by the detail, the information, and are left wondering why Feddie Mercury and David Bowie are on the Abyssal Plain, and then you figure out that they are …
Under Pressure :smack:
XKCD isn’t regular reading, but sometimes, it is so very good.
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Yea, that wasn’t that obscure though. If your a certain age you’ve almost certainly heard the relevant song. But the “hatch at the bottom of the ocean” thing was apparently a reference to a particular ending in a particular Choose Your Own Adventure book. That’s getting pretty obtuse.
In a few months I suspect Randal will be writing jokes that depend on the reader knowing that one story where his friend Mike got really drunk that one time.
I didn’t get the CTOA reference, but still through the hatch was funny just as a “funny thing for James Cameron to do” with as much meaning as putting a crashed alien spacecraft there. If there’s a reference, so much the better, but I think it works without one.
I also thought that the Romney quiz was funny on a silly non-sequitur level. Maybe I’m just easily amused.
That’s very funny. I’ve seen a few of these quizzes and all of them were awful. I guess it’s easy to figure out which quotes were Romney and which were Burns if you’ve spend hundreds of hours watching The Simpsons like I have, but I got a 10/10 on the Newt Gingrich vs. Buzz Lightyear quiz and I’ve never even seen Toy Story. The quizzes are a lame, lazy attempt at humor, so I like the twist of comparing two people who are absolutely nothing alike and using quotes that are unmistakably from either a campaign or from the book.
I like how when XKCD isn’t super obscure and needs tons of deconstruction to fully “understand” people complain that the writer is “really stretching it”.
I agree. I found this xkcd comic funny, although possibly a little far along on the absurdist spectrum.
“See if you can tell the difference between X and Y” lists are very common on the internet, so I don’t think the joke is as obscure as some people are making it. It’s not just about the Romney/Mr. Burns comparison. Most of them are pretty lame and easy to distinguish. Making one that’s obviously lame and easy to distinguish is funny.
It’s not his best work, but I don’t think it’s a good data point for the “xkcd is sliding into obscure and self-referential irrelevance” argument.
Seriously? The Burns quotes are obvious to me, and I don’t even watch the Simpsons. That’s the joke: you might as well have someone completely different from Romney, because cartoon villains don’t say things that real people do. Even if that real person is a greedy asshole.
Like nearly all humor that actually makes me laugh, he’s making fun of something stupid.
ETA: I see Marley and walrus (and maybe Munch) got it, too.
The joke’s not hard to get - it’s just not particularly, or even mildly, funny.
Mitt Romney doesn’t say things that real people do, either.
I thought the crashed alien ship was a reference to The Abyss.
The joke’s not hard to get if you are familiar with the fact that lots of other people have done this sort of joke comparison. Which I wasn’t, basically.