You’ve read his webcomics even if you don’t know his name: Randall Munroe. Or even if you don’t know the name of the comic that made him famous, xkcdSome of his best strips have been collected in books and one of the latest has just been published in Spanish, ‘Instructions for…‘, which develops sophisticated and unnecessarily convoluted systems to carry out the simplest actions.
Following in the footsteps of the mythical Professor Franz of CopenhagenMunroe sets off some crazy inventions. With them, we can do things as basic as predicting the weather (by analyzing the pixels in Facebook photos), finding out if you’re a baby boomer or a child of the nineties (by measuring the radioactivity of your teeth), taking a selfie (with a telescope) or delivering supplies to your home (by destroying the fabric of space-time).
Absurd physical and mathematical calculations are the key to Munroe’s humour. He is a meticulous and patient observer who extracts elements of everyday life that go unnoticed but are based on the most basic science (or not so much) and turns them into brilliant deductions. His graphic style, with stick figures, and his tendency to use meticulous graphics and data extracted from verifiable sources round out a humour that is pure internet in its devotion to nonsense, but also in its sharpening of the most bizarre knowledge.
Munroe’s strips have been collected in various volumes and this ‘Instructions for’ is the latest of them, although it is not a collection, but rather unpublished material with texts accompanying his very recognizable illustrations. It is, in fact, a magnificent gateway to the cartoonist’s world, since the aesthetics and the kilometer-long dialogues with which he sometimes fills the screen can be an uphill struggle for newcomers. These texts accompanied by drawings, more akin to the concept of a traditional “humor book”, are more accessible.
The one percent
There is a very famous quote from Munroe that perfectly sums up her brand of humor. Referring to the non-accessibility of her stories, she stated in a Interview with The New York Times that “you can draw something that appeals to 1% of the audience,” and then adds: “1% of the United States, that is, three million people. That is, more readers than the most modest comic strips can have.” That is the key to his humor: an objective fact observed with irony and overwhelming logic to extract from it an edge appropriate to what he wants to communicate, often with an ironic sense, turning the initial fact on its head.
But this is just the surface, of course: his humor can be extremely convoluted, even if it doesn’t even seem like a joke at times. For example, This painting (which gained considerable popularity around the time of the Fukushima accident, and was republished by numerous media outlets around the world) in which the radiation doses required to kill a human being are explained, with coloured boxes that increase exponentially, from just being close to someone to going through an X-ray machine or getting close to a nuclear accident. There are no jokes, but the fact that it is presented visually in this way implies a strange and subtle ironic extravagance, very typical of Munroe.
Another example of his peculiar point of view and his relationship with science: in the two volumes of his books ‘What if…?’, which bear the subtitle “Serious and scientific answers to absurd questions”, he collects questions that have been asked by his readers from all fields of science. For example: “From what height would you have to drop a steak so that it would be cooked when it hit the ground?” Or “What would happen if you made a periodic table with cube-shaped bricks, where each brick was made of the corresponding element?”
One of Munroe’s most popular strips, and one that demonstrates the stories’ strange balance of humor, essay, and meticulous observation.
The funny thing is that the answers are… extremely scientific. She takes ideas that everyone understands and explores what happens when those ideas are pushed to their limits. Which is ultimately one of the motivations of science: to explore the limits of human knowledge. Munroe, with her humor, is dedicated to stretching those limits, except that she doesn’t do it to publish a paper, but to generate humor through extravagance or unexpected logic.
Munroe has also done a lot to help us understand the internet. His legendary cartoon The “I can’t go to bed, there’s someone wrong on the Internet” line is funny because it’s exactly what we’ve all felt when we got into an online argument. But until he came along, no one had examined this universal psychology of the Internet user with such clarity.
His clinical eye is so sharp that his jokes are timeless. For example, we recently saw this old cartoon about How digital structures workSomething complex and precariously balanced is maintained by a single person who has been doing it since 2003 with a computer in Nebraska (for example). When a seemingly inconsequential failure caused errors in airports and computer systems around the world and paralyzed all kinds of companies for 24 hours a couple of weeks ago, it was inevitable not to think of Munroe.
It is inevitable that some of his cartoons have expired, such as This beautiful map of online communities. Others are downright incomprehensible if you weren’t a programmer in the 90s. And yet, you have an invaluable historical value. Someone understood the internet and expressed it in hilarious jokes. And that has forever changed the way we see the networks.
Header | xkcd
On Aroged | This historical comic has 2374 issues, I’ve spent months trying to read them all… but I think I’ll never finish
