The author is observing that many people in his target audience have had a recurring anxiety-inducing dream about showing up to a college class on the last day after not attending most of the semester, even after being out of college for many years. It is unclear, however, if people who have not attended college would have this dream. Assuming not, this shows that the author presumes that most of his readers have attended formal institutions of higher education, providing a basis for them to have had this dream. This reinforces the idea that this is a comic for “smart people.”
The author has created another graph-based comic strip. This one appears to be a bar graph comparing categories of 11th grade activities with their usefulness to career success. One would do well to note the complete lack of art, sports, business and socialization activities in this graph.
As with most of these comics, the underlying assumption is that the reader is an IT professional who discovered a love for programming in high school. The punchline here relies completely on reader identification: ”This comic mentioned PERL. I use that from time to time in my job. The author understands me and I can imagine being his friend.”
Satan enters hoping to tempt an unsuspecting person with a faustian bargain, only to find that he himself has forfeited his own soul with the real-life equivalent of a click through software EULA.
Furries are an internet subculture dedicated to erotica involving human animal hybrids. This is typically approximated by illustration, and erotic literature. Furries will sometimes purchase full sized fur suits with holes cut out for both internal and external genitalia.
In this comic the protagonist is dressed in his fur suit. He is subject to harassment by a group of nerds. The protagonist’s foil is a woman flying a kite. She explains that while she may be uncomfortable with his sexual preferences, it is hypocritical of the nerds to to ostracize him for it. This is because nerds are known to both indulge in and be accepting of a wide variety of sexual fetishes.
(Note: Almost all live action furry porn with fur suits is homosexual.)
The first three frames portray the Pope speaking from a pulpit, declaring that his audience has caused a disaster for the church. His audience flippantly apologizes for what they have done. In the third frame the reader finds out that the problem is that there are now only two parts to the trinity. However, in Christian theology, the Holy Trinity is comprised of three persons - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Missing from the Pope’s list is the Holy Spirit.
The joke is that the Holy Spirit is sometimes referred to as the Holy Ghost, and, as the reader discovers in the final frame, the Ghostbusters (from the classic 1984 feature film) have destroyed him with their proton packs. This equates the Holy Ghost from the Christian Godhead to an average class 5 free roaming vapor.
A man wearing a Hasidic Jew’s black hat is walking. He meets a man wearing two stacked hats of the same dark style. This gives the one-hatted man pause. He then reverses his stride, walking backwards away from the dual-hatted man.
This comic makes marginally more sense if you know that dark Hasidic Jew Hats are a sign of ill intent and malevolent intelligence in the XKCD universe. It suggests that the typically evil black-hatted anti-hero is afraid of someone with even more hats. The author, we assume, does not intend to apply any anti-semitic connotations by this message.
A heterosexual couple is talking as they walk hand-in-hand on the state of their relationship. While the female continues to ask questions suggesting she feels their relationship has stagnated and is now decaying, the male simply repeats “I love you” as a reply to every statement. In the final panel, he begins to drown out her concerns by saying “I love you” over and over again.
This comic is most likely dark humor reflecting on a persistent theme in XKCD: insecurity of men within classic heterosexual relationships, particularly from the perspective of a woman seeming to “require more” than the man knows how or is prepared to give.
One mathematician in front of an equation-covered chalkboard explains to his friend that he is “too old for this shit,” claiming that math seems to be getting harder as he gets older. The punchline is that it turns out that the mathematician is only 13, which is funny because 13 hardly seems old at all.
This strip is almost certainly a reference to the last decade of mathematical breakthroughs found by very young students such as Sarrah Flannery, who in 1999 published a ground-breaking mathematics paper at the age of 16.
The author laments that his habit of typing “alt-tab” (to switch to his web browser) and then immediately entering a url of a popular news site to quickly check on the state of current news affairs is so ingrained that he does it reflexively. He even does it when using a typewriter, which cannot browse the internet. This leaves tabs and urls interspersed all throughout a heartfelt hand-typed letter to the author’s grandmother. This is especially funny because it is unlikely grandma will understand what is going on, because she is old and the internet probably confuses her.
This strip makes the observation that it is extremely difficult to remember vivid dreams and explain them to others. In the first frame, the dreamer has just woken up and the startling details of his dream are still fresh in his mind. As he descends the stairs to tell his girlfriend what he has just experienced, the reader can begin to see the details of his dream begin to fade away. By the time he is speaking to his girlfriend, the pertinent details are all but gone from his memory forever.
The act of remembering your dreams is called dream recall, which is a skill that can be honed like any other. If the main character wanted to better remember his dreams, he could engage in practices such as keeping a dream journal or the use of the calea zacatechichi herb.