Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Is XKCD the Farside of the internet generation?
Well?
Comments
What is Farside?
Also: nah, a spring.
I think you mean "The Far Side".
^ It's a comic series by Gary Larson. Each comic is one single panel containing a scene where something is out-of-the-ordinary, and there is frequently a one-liner of text below the panel, representing the thought or speech of a character.
These comics frequently contain somewhat-witty, but not laugh-out-loud, humor.
To be very honest, The Far Side has a far larger laugh rate per strip than XKCD, where you absolutely must have prior knowledge of or work in a specific field to "get" a particular joke.
Far Side was just plain surrealism. XKCD is surrealism as projected onto very technical fields not everyone will have the necessary experience in to get the joke.
Some of the jokes in The Far Side were pretty esoteric, particularly given that the strip came into its own at a time when the Internet really wasn't a thing. Larson loved to reference relatively obscure information about zoology and anthropology, for example, given the jokes a kind of double-edged humour that not everyone was going to get.
That said, XKCD is a fairly different strip from The Far Side in many respects. The Perry Bible Fellowship might be a closer comparison, despite using a strip format rather than a single panel gag most of the time, but even then the parallels are imperfect.
PBF is more about disturbing ways of thinking of things, which xkcd isn't about.
I was comparing The Perry Bible Fellowship to The Far Side rather than XKCD. Munroe and Larson may share geekiness in common, but the sheer perversity of Gurewitch's imagination is in sympathy with Larson's sense of humour in a way that Munroe's snarkiness generally is not.
The big difference between The Far Side and XKCD is that the former is a humor comic, while the latter is a whatever-Munroe-feels-like-doodling comic that kind of strains itself to pretend to be a humor comic.
Take today's strip. It presents an interesting fact. Then it shoehorns in what I think is supposed to be a joke, but really isn't all that funny. The interesting fact is the good part of the strip.
Really, I think Munroe is at his best when he's doing something more long-form and just putting in jokes where good ones naturally arise, as he does in the "what if" column he's been doing lately, which is solid gold.
Well, in that comic there really isn't a joke per se, just a mildly funny little throwaway line to underline the point. But you are correct, XKCD is at its best (and often funniest) when it's not trying to be funny.
Well I think it's more like this:
PBF tries to be bizarre, disturbing, and make odd observations.
xkcd tries to be witty, funny, and make odd observations.
The Far Side tries to be bizarre, witty, and occasionally funny.
I think TFS is closer to xkcd because of this.
They're incredibly dissimilar in almost every way, so no.
Also, while xkcd is certainly a decent webcomic (even if its creator is kind of a dick), The Far Side is one of the best comics of any type ever, so putting them head to head is just unfair to xkcd.
the fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you.
Perhaps "dick" is the wrong word, but he has some odd ideas about things.
A lot of webcomic creators have opinions that are all over the place. It's just something that happens.
> A lot of webcomic creators have opinions that are all over the place. It's just something that happens.
A lot of people have opinions that are all over the place. It's just that some of them happen to be webcomic creators.
Did that even need to be said?
To be honest yes, because I believe people can forget that anyone can and will have absurd opinions regardless of their profession.
If you say so.
I don't know what crazy arcana you guys are subscribing to, but leave me out of it!
It's a good rule of thumb that anyone you meet will have at least one opinion you find stupid, hypocritical, and/or terrifying. If they don't, congratulations! You're talking to a potato.
They are seeking the troof.
I really think I should be allowed to find people irritating without getting this thrown at me every time I say such.
That game was such a waste of money.
I got it in a bundle.