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Comic 702: I have heard of a thing you have also heard of

Why hello there, xkcdsucks. As you may have read in my previous critically-acclaimed post, "placeholder," Carl is basically a lazy puddle of sludge, and he's drafted me to guest-post for him for yet another week. I feel the need to repeat this because there are apparently some of you who can't tell when someone is guest-posting, despite the large "posted by Jay" text at the bottom. So for those people, this is Jay, NOT Carl, if you have hatemail please direct it to JAY, that's jay (at) jay (dot) jay. This is my real email address. Look, I'll be honest with you: I'm not sure I want to be here right now. This comic is not interesting to me. It just struck me that there are more important things I could be doing, for instance, anything, and I would be happily doing them right now if only Carl would let me out of this basement. But alas, I'm stuck, so we're going to break this comic down, panel by panel, cause that's the Jay way.

The references in this comic are as follows:
Panel 2: Rocky and Bullwinkle
Panel 3: 4chan meme
Panel 4: Ralph S. Mouse (shouldn't that be 'motorcycle'?)
Panel 6: Lord of the Rings
Panel 8: Chess
Panel 9: Calvin and Hobbes
Panel 10: Calvin and Hobbes (because all that hilarity couldn't be contained in one panel)
Panel 11: Current events
Panel 12: The Large Hadron Collider

Panel 1 is a setup, and panels 5 and 7 are just retarded.

Now, what you've probably already noticed is that most of these references don't even contain an attempt at a joke. Show of hands if you're surprised? The two Calvin and Hobbes panels, for example, are one degree of effort above drawing a picture of Calvin and Hobbes and labelling it "Calvin and Hobbes." What is there to say about this that we haven't already said? No, references do not count as jokes, and no, they are not an acceptable substitute. Everybody already knows this, except of course for Randall and his fans, so let's just move on please and talk about longcat.

For the none of you here who have never heard of him, longcat is a 4chan meme that made the rounds a few years ago. It consisted of a picture of a white cat that was slightly longer than average, which the internet thought was just the most hilarious thing ever. Cue: photoshops. Five short years later, enter Randall Munroe.

As people have pointed out, it's longcat's body that's long, not his legs, so his footprints would actually be spaced out normally. To this I say: who gives a shit? No, really, guys? The problem with this panel isn't that his footprints aren't spaced normally, it's that they are. They're barely distinguishable from the prints in panel one, and without the caption I wouldn't have been able to tell they weren't left by a normal cat. You know what would have been (slightly) funnier? If Randall stretched the panel out to huge proportions, so much that it broke the format of the comic, and put longcat's footprints at opposite corners. Picture it. Don't you agree?

Panels 5 and 7 both capitalize on the theme of "animals using objects meant for humans" (technically, so does panel 4.) This is meant to be funny. It is not. Panel 5 is just a setup for the pun in the alt text, and panel 7 is random wackiness, which after pop culture references is probably the lowest form of humor.

The knight panel is the cleverest in the comic, but it fails for one simple reason: those look like normal footsteps. Especially on the left. Honestly, is there anyone here who thought, "my, that thing certainly is moving in an L shape"? No, you thought, "why the fuck would a knight have round feet?" Here's what I would have done instead: given the knight two footprints, made him walk like a normal human, but in a clear L-pattern. I tried to do a mockup of this in paint, but it turned out to be a lot of work, so instead I invite you to use the magical tool known as imagination.

I don't have much to say about the remaining panels. In the further interests of being topical, we have a Lord of the Rings reference, which I maybe would have chuckled at in 2003. Neither the Prius one nor the Higgs Boson are particularly funny, but they're a cut above the rest, which pretty much typify xkcd's usual tepid lameness. In fact, as the good folks over at xkcdexplained pointed out, this comic is very representative of xkcd as a whole. We have a meme, pop culture references, physics, and whatever current events happened to be linked on Randall's news sites three weeks ago. We just need a couple breaking up. How would you show that with snow prints?

On a scale of one "meh" to five, I rate this comic the wholly unremarkable number of three. Stay tuned for the next one. Until then, keep on rocking.