Toby, Dave & Ian Explain XKCD

When using a laptop while defecating, one is likely to spend longer on the activity than without. Extended defecation time could also be the result of dysentery, an inflammatory disorder of the intestine. Dysentery and laptops both cause people to be on the toilet for longer than is usual.

The key factor in this comic is that dysentery was common in the past, while laptops are common in the present.

The author is like Seinfeld except his only medium is graphs.

Note: making an observation into a graph may decrease its humor.

In this strip, the word “sausage” is substituted for “notation” in Reverse Polish Notation. As you can see, the hot dog is lying next to, not inside of the hot dog bun.

This is funny because in Reverse Polish Notation the operator (hot dog) follows the operands (bun).

One of the hardships with Linux use is the lack of hardware support for the operating system. A commonly believed misconception is that the community will come together to solve these issues through software.

The medical doctor is aware of this misconception and uses it to target the patient as a Linux user.

Here the author makes a nested reference involving the blockbuster 2002 Marvel movie “Spiderman”. In “Spiderman” Peter Parker (Toby McGuire) is told by his Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson) that “with great power comes great responsibility.” This movie moment was so memorable that it has become perhaps the most popular quotable line of its decade in cinema.

The author takes it a step further, though by juxtaposing “power” with the scientific notion of power, alluding to Ohm’s Law which describes how much power (which is actual capacity for real work done, typically measured in “watts”) a typical circuit can facilitate. The specific forumula in question is: Power = C^2 * R, where C = (the total current across the circuit) and R = (the total resistance of the circuit). This particular expression of Ohm’s Law not necessarily the most useful formulation of the identity, but is frequently one of the first version described by college level textbooks.

Thusly, the punchline of this comic is the comic juxtaposition of ”power” (as in social power or physical strength) with the scientific notion of “power”–thus creating the absurd image of Ohm inheriting scientific wisdom from a fictitious uncle–to tie a popular scientific equation with the unlikely pairing of a popular piece of cinema.

The male in this strip is a geek so he has Asperger syndrome, this is not a surprise. The surprise is that the female has Asperger syndrome as well.

This causes a conflict since neither party is willing to initiate a social interaction with the other, even though they are mutually attracted.

Note: The author has Asperger syndrome.

The box on the right advertises that it does not contain asbestos. One may presume that the reason for this label was to make a weary customer assume the other two do contain asbestos. This would lead to the customer purchasing the product on the right.

The author dislikes this tactic, but is intelligent enough to be aware of its effect.

While a “tornado hunter” actually refers to a person who chases after tornadoes in order to document them for scientific purposes, these guys thought it meant you actually pursue a tornado and kill it, similar to hunting animals. However, in a twist of comic absurdity, they were actually able to kill a tornado with a gun. They then had to mount it to their car, as though they had killed a deer.

The hunter also wears a pith helmet and has a large mustache, like a stereotypical british big game hunter.

This comic references the immensely popular book “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card, in which a young genius and his two older genius siblings (who were not selected for Ender’s role because of their unstable personalities) effect massive political change on a world locked in a war for survival with a foreign species. While Ender is in space learning to be a space general and govern space armies, his less stable siblings Peter and Valentine try to help stabilize the world’s tumultuous political scene by going onto the world network anonymously and posting political advice under the pseudonyms of “Locke” and ”Demosthenes”. Eventually these pseudonyms, because of their undeniable brilliance and powerful prose, begin to have influence over world politics.

This comic plays off the forwards-thinking fictitious technology of Orson Scott Card’s world (which plainly predicted such tech-culture staples as text messaging and hacking and weblogs) by placing it in a the modern real-world context of a well known blogging engine, Wordpress. While this might be enough for the typical XKCD punchline, the author has also a slight undercurrent of irony because it is highly unlikely that any modern blogger could gain enough influence amongst the noise of the internet to actually alter world politics, especially with a blog that sports the default WordPress theme.

The author learned about or was reminded of Punnett squares, either from a biology student friend or Wikipedia, and decided to make a humorous comic strip on the subject. The format he eventually landed on was of the “improbable human interaction” variety, wherein the humor is derived from two-to-three people doing or saying something unrealistic.

This particular interaction involves two biologists on a first date who find themselves creating Punnett squares in order to determine the genetic traits of any children they would have if they were to mate. This is funny because you would not expect two adults on a first date to discuss having children, especially in such a clinical fashion.

Trivia: 97% of sex can be made more comfortable for geeks to discuss in the context of a science-related joke.

A hollywood studio acquires the rights to a book to make a movie version of it, but one of the producers tries to explain that it wouldn’t make sense to make a violent summer blockbuster out of it. Without even finding out why it wouldn’t make sense, they tell him to do it anyways because those types of movies make a lot of money. They hire Michael Bay because he is known for making mindless big budget summer blockbuster movies such as Transformers and Armageddon. Bay then proceeds to create an extremely violent movie about a female spy who indulges in killing and torture with the requisite explosions and bloodshed.

The reader then discovers that the book the producers acquired the rights to was Harriet The Spy, a delightful children’s book about an 11 year old girl from New York who would like to be a spy when she grows up. The book’s content has nothing to do with what the movie portrays. This is a commentary on the seemingly singular focus the big Hollywood studios have on making money rather than meaningful art. Instead of making an accurate portrayal of Louise Fitzhugh’s story that could have entertained children and their families, the producers instead chose to go after maximum profits by exploiting America’s voracious appetite for mindless violent entertainment.