2015-10-02

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1570 - Engineer Syllogism


I totally had to look up what syllogism meant, but that's totally a personal failing on my end.

This comic is thirteen letters too long to be used as a tweet, but it's still one of the most "could be a tweet" comics XKCD's put out. Look how text-driven it is, to the point where it lists out the segments of the joke. It might as well be labeling panels one through three with a big caption saying "SETUP" and panel four with one saying "PUNCHLINE". It's so dry. I understand that keeping it as a syllogism requires the different statements to be numerically labelled, but why does it have to be a syllogism? It just subtracts from the humor the joke could have had without adding anything.

The punchline is also actually impossible. He hasn't even finished deciding to enter the stock market, and he's already lost all of his money to it. Is exaggeration for comic effect a thing? Sure, but there's a limit. Like, it could have been funny if he got a few more words in and had his hands on the keyboard with little "type type" sound effects, but when he clearly hasn't actually started it's a lot less fun to see him get cut off.

In conclusion, it's more like an engineer sylloJISM!

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