2015-12-01

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1610 - Fire Ants

 Here in the entomology department, we have a simple two-step formula for answering any question: (1) ants are cool, and (2) we forgot the question because we were thinking about ants.

As this one abridged series I found on YouTube this one time said: "Ah, at last, regular updates." Feels good man.

I really liked where I thought this comic was going at first. Guy is uncertain about his future and goes to Authority Figure for guidance, but the advice she gives is useless. Guy takes a beat panel to mull over the life choices that lead to this moment. It spoke to me as an angsty college student. But then that pesky fourth panel comes along and retroactively ruins the prior three.

Guy isn't reflecting or contemplating running away to join the foreign legion, he's actively absorbing the 'advice' and only realizes it's useless after running it over a few times. Authority Figure is still useless, but it's not in a satirical way. I was expecting her to say "If you have any other questions, please see the department that hands out colorful brochures, the department's name is available online" or something to that effect.

As it actually exists, the joke is rather toothless. It's just the story of the quirky adviser who liked ants. Although I do like the (possibly unintentional) pun in the last line, probably more than I should.

That fact about fire ants building a raft is so 2008, though. I remember seeing like five posts about it back in the day on Failblog. First there was the video, and then there were four screenshots of comments on the video, which if I'm remembering correctly, were all some variation on "I jerked off to this".

(2008 was a simpler time.)

No comments:

Post a Comment