This may be the most obscure XKCD comic strips I ever had to deal with. The previous winner was the one where I had to watch the movie Primer to figure out the punchline. Most of the obscure ones can usually figured out with a Google query.
Had you ever heard the urban legend the strip is referring to? I thought it was hilarious. I didn’t get the AAA Club joke until BigT linked to the AIDS Club reference, but the kidney joke I recognized immediately.
Google for:
kidney ice bath
I think those are pretty obvious search terms. In both cases, the first hit was a Snopes link to the urban legend in question. Granted, for the first one, you have to figure out that the little blobs are kidneys, but they look pretty kidney-like to me. (Of course, I’ve had a City of Villains character called “Kidney Thief” for years, so it wasn’t much of a leap for me.)
Googling the words “wake”, “ice”, and “bath” together also gets you the Snopes link, though it’s a few hits down the page, below some YouTube links, so at least there’s a way past the stick-figure kidneys.
Because the thread title is 941.
Fixed that.
Everybody stand back!
Sorry or maybe I should say Srory.
Exactly!
I wonder if Monroe is prepared for the Strip 1k problem.
It looks to me like we have an excellent opportunity for a discussion of which XKCD strip is the most obscure.
The problem with Xkcd is that you suspect that you are a smart enough fellow, the artist is just not too clear about his jokes, but you can’t say anything in case everybody else did get it and it turns out that you are too dumb.
In my opinion, the character realizing that his ice had been stolen should have been the last panel punchline.
I think the most obscure is going to be something much more limited in audience. I have no idea what PERL is, so I don’t fully get the strip that chrisk linked to. But I can appreciate that it’s some programming joke, and understand it on that level without bothering to learn what “regular expressions” or what “escape a space” mean.
The stolen kidney urban legend is popular and been around long enough that my mom has probably heard of it. I don’t think it’d ever be in the running.
Do you mean, cut out the bathtub full of kidneys altogether, or just swap the last two panels, so we see him in the bathtub asleep, and then he wakes up and realizes his ice has been stolen?
The latter.
I have to admit that I really loved this one because, for once, I got the obscure joke, since it wasn’t pop culture related.
You see, the reason I even found this site was because I visited snopes religiously, ran out of urban legends from hitting the random button, and so headed into their forums, where one urban legend was debunked by a Straight Dope article.
And all of this is because I used to think Mr. Ed was really a zebra…