How to Make Friends
How to Make Friends
[First panel with words, with the words in the center white and on a black oval background, which is in turn on the white background:] Presenting:
How to make friends
[Second panel with Cueball and Hairy facing each other:] Cueball: Want to go eat food together? Cueball: We could also sit together and talk without eating. I don't need to eat. I mean, I do need to eat. But if you don't want to eat then we can just talk. I can eat later.
[Third panel with words, same format as first panel:] Okay
It turns out I still haven't figured out how to do this.
Sorry

This comic follows a sample interaction, purportedly showing how to make friends. We see Cueball 's strategy for making friends. It does incorporate various points of advice for building friendships, which are completely sound in the abstract. But it's clearly not helping him -- he's out of sync with the interaction context and makes bigger social gaffes by following the abstract advice. Escalating awkwardness ensues.
It starts out with a common way of making friends or interacting with friends, hanging out over a meal. However, Cueball suggests doing so with awkwardly literal phrasing; whereas most people use expressions such as “have lunch” or “grab a bite to eat”, Cueball explicitly invites Hairy to “eat food”. The fact that he feels the need to clarify that they’ll be eating food, as opposed to any other orally consumable items, indicates his lack of confidence to clearly communicate his intentions.
Before Hairy can even respond, Cueball then says that they could instead “sit together and talk without eating.” Although this is indeed another common way to make friends, it’s kind of an odd way to phrase it, especially since he didn’t even give Hairy a chance to reply to his initial suggestion. Cueball then says he doesn’t need to eat (meaning not right now , especially as a prerequisite to talking), but he immediately feels compelled to clarify that he does need to eat (meaning in general ). Again, it’s weird that he clarified, as his original wording probably would have been understood. He then awkwardly remarks about how he can eat later if Hairy would rather just talk. The overall implication is that Cueball’s awkwardness and over-explanation would put off a typical person, although some people find it endearing .
This is a situation that Randall has encountered before, in 1746: Making Friends , in which he offered "advice" to play dead to attract new friends and/or turkey vultures; presumably he has "learned" from his unsuccessful attempts and is trying more conversational approaches, but apologizes to the reader as he hasn't quite figured that out either.
The title text says Cueball wants to be friends at Hairy, rather than with him, which isn’t how friendship usually works. “At” implies that Cueball considers being friends to be a unilateral action that he needs to direct towards Hairy, like “smiling at” or “pointing at”, and does not understand that it is typically a mutual activity of building a relationship, which would be indicated by being friends with him. “At” can even carry a degree of animosity (compare: “he just phoned up to wash his head at us” ).
[First panel with words, with the words in the center white and on a black oval background, which is in turn on the white background:] Presenting:
How to make friends
[Second panel with Cueball and Hairy facing each other:] Cueball: Want to go eat food together? Cueball: We could also sit together and talk without eating. I don't need to eat. I mean, I do need to eat. But if you don't want to eat then we can just talk. I can eat later.
[Third panel with words, same format as first panel:] Okay
It turns out I still haven't figured out how to do this.
Sorry
