Comic 872: Randall learns about Fairy Tales

Alt-text: Goldilocks' discovery of Newton's method for approximation required surprisingly few changes.

I'm just gonna skip over the whole 'original first panel' disaster with the dialogue as Rob has covered it. Just assume I mentioned something funny about Randy not getting do-overs.

I'm trying to follow Randall's thought pattern on the creation of this comic. Was it simply 'I know, let's mash up some maths with some fairy tales, that'll be hilarious!' Am I missing how the most of the maths references are actually relevant? Or did he come up with one idea, and force the rest?

I ask this because the 'Three Little Pigs' one kind of makes sense, if you assume Randy is referencing a convergent series. It's possible to imagine a story of an infinite number of little pigs building houses to avoid getting eaten, each iteration getting closer and closer to survival without ever quite making it. It's not a great comedic idea, especially given the delivery here, but there is a logic behind it (and it's remarkably similar to an earlier, much better one-panel joke).

The other references are completely nonsensical. Okay, it is possible to imagine the prince in Cinderella using factor analysis to narrow his search for Cinderella down, but it's a stretch and not even slightly fucking funny. Why not use demographics to show how freakishly tiny Cinderella's feet must have been if only she could wear the slippers? That's probably a comic in itself.

But no. Randy just uses it to shoehorn the word 'eigenvector' in there, just like he shoehorns in that topology reference in the grasshopper story. That one is outright nonsensical. Randy could have written about the grasshopper turning into an isosceles triangle and it would have made as much sense as a joke, but then his grotesque, toadying, teenage-nerd fans couldn't enjoy a feeling of superiority that everyone else pities them for. Reading the forums is like listening to a guy brag to his friends about how many blow-up dolls he has fucked, and all his friends are trying to one-up him.

Oh God, there's two more references? What the fuck do inductive proofs have to do with Snow White? Why (n-1) dwarfs? Using 'Little Red Riding Hood' would make a tiny bit more sense here, but it doesn't change the essentially half-arsed, bullshit nature of the 'joke'. The Goldilocks reference in the alt-text actually makes sense, and is slightly funnier than anything in the actual comic. Slightly.

I delved into the forums as well, and discovered about half of the them love this comic. I swear I fucking hate his brown-nosing, maths-fetishist, lickspittle fans more than I do Randall. They are the reason xkcd has become what it has.

And just to end on a completely different note than normal, I recently went to see the film Paul with a creationist friend. That was fucking awkward.

BINGO TIME!

Bingo appears to be collapsing under Rob's continued actual-review assault.

 
But the cuddlefish are keeping quiet. Watching. Waiting.