Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).
> Describe xkcd hereWhat? No, we're not doing another Describe Topic Here joke.> sudo Describe xkcd hereOkay.xkcd—Standard Content Warnings on xkcd comic pages
is a Stick Figure Comic by Randall Munroe. It is a gag-a-day comic and generally does not have a continuing plot line or continuity (though there are occasional short story arcs). Many of the jokes are based on math, physics, UNIX or Internet memes, as well as romance and sex. It utilizes Alt Text for each and every comic, which contains additional jokes and context.Originally a relatively unknown set of personal sketches and doodles, it grew in popularity in 2006 when other webcomics (such as Dinosaur Comics) began linking to it. However, it was when Randall posted "Map of the Internet" and said map was subsequently featured on Slashdot that xkcd's popularity truly erupted. Since then, it has been among the most well-known of webcomics.Of course, you wouldn't know that just by looking at the comic. The characters are still drawn as very basic stick figures, with no facial features other than hairstyle (which is often used to distinguish males and females). However, there are three recurring characters who can be recognized by their respective headgear:- "Black Hat Guy": a Jerkass badass character with a black pork-pie hat, who in one storyline encountered a woman who out-Jerkassed him and has now become her romantic interest.
- A beret-clad Cloudcuckoolander and Anti-Nihilist, generally thought of as an Existentialist, albeit one with a thing for pastries.
- A dark-haired woman, referred to in several comics as "Megan"; she shares many of the same interests with the nondescript Author Avatar and is commonly shown to be in a relationship with him. Was the main character of the "Choices" Series.
- There also seems to be a recurring main character with a distinct personality (most likely the author's own), but since he looks exactly the same as all the other stick figures without hair or hats, it could be argued that he's just a stock character. He has picked up the nickname Cueball.
existential nihilist—but most of them are less distinctive.Has mentioned this very wiki. The wiki has returned the favor, taking many xkcd comics for page images (see Trivia.XKCD for the list), as well as (formerly; may he be mourned) making the image for all pages under the category "Webcomic" a little picture of Black Hat Guy.xkcd is part of the documentation for goto on the PHP website, and was mentioned as a ticket in a changelog
◊note .Two big occurrences for the comic happened in 2012. The webcomic reached one thousand comics in January; as the above-mentioned main character says, "Wow—just 24 to go until a big round-number milestone!" Later in June, xkcd added a section called What If? to its website, where Randall tackles hypothetical questions with physics and silly drawings. Has a lot of snark.Numerologists take note: adding up the numerical values of the title's letters yields a sum of 42. Coincidence?...Yes.Completely unrelated, but some fans had the bright idea to create graphs in xkcd style.The subcomic Time, now finished, is so big that it has its own page now.The "small game" Hoverboard also now has its own page.Tropes used by this webcomic:
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# & A-E
- 20% More Awesome: Used repeatedly, including this particularly meta example involving a graph about a decline in a relationship that might be caused by graphing things.
- Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder: 57: Wait For Me.
- Achievements in Ignorance: Beret Guy does this a lot. Vacuum is an example.
- Affectionate Parody: 141: Parody Week, whose strips don't really make fun of anything and, in some cases, could actually have been used by the regular cartoonist except for the artwork. It turns into a deconstruction of parody with the author halting his MegaTokyo parody because he feels sorry for the writer. The author also stops a later Penny Arcade parody because he respects the writers too much (with the respect transitioning to Ho Yay and then Slash Fic before he finishes.)
- Age-Gap Algebra: #314 cites the "half-your-age-plus-seven" rule and provides the trope image.
- Aggressive Categorism: 385: How It Works.Guy to Guy: Wow, you suck at math.Guy to Girl: Wow, girls suck at math.
- A.I. is a Crapshoot:
- All Just a Dream: 806, "Tech Support".
- All Love Is Unrequited: 642, "Creepy".
- Alt Text: Every single comic has a second punchline if you hover your mouse over the comic for a few seconds. This is probably one of the most well-known examples of such, in fact (even providing the trope page's image).
- Ambiguous Syntax: Hyphen and Jacket.
- Anachronism Stew: Discussed. No one will care in the future.
- Analogy Backfire: "And from that day on, I wore this little F key pendant everywhere I went."
- Angrish: One comic has a father conditioning his daughter's speech centers to shut down when she's upset. Hilarity Ensues to say the least: 573, "Parental Trolling".
- Animal Athlete Loophole:
- There's no rule saying a meerkat can't play rugby!
- Nor anything in any Terms of Service saying that dogs can't play baseball in the server room. (the Alt Text)
- You have to be careful when invoking this excuse, since there's also no rule against the other team killing and eating the animal. note
- There's no rule saying a meerkat can't play rugby!
- Anti-Advice: Consult an engineer or programmer before any business venture.
- Anything but That!: Many of the strips revolve around Randall's fear of velociraptors.
- Applied Mathematics: It's fond of this.
- April Fools' Day:
- For 2010, they changed the layout so that you navigate through the comics with a text interface. If you typed in 'cat' with no arguments, you'd get a line of text that reads "You're a kitty!" There were a lot of Easter Eggs hidden in there. 'make me a sandwich'/'sudo make me a sandwich', emacs, the Konami Code... the list goes on.
- For 2011, all comics went 3D. Also counts as Hypocritical Humor given the April Fool's comic itself.
- For 2012, the comic itself changes depending upon the web browser one views the comic with (as well as various other factors, such as location and operating system, but the web browser is the easiest to view the change with), with at least four different variations in Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera.
- For 2010, they changed the layout so that you navigate through the comics with a text interface
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
- "There's no porn set atop storm chasing vans. No homoerotic spelling bees. No women playing electric guitar in the shower". The last one actually worked, so it probably was not so bad.
- The future predictions for 2100 end with: "Rainforests mostly gone due to climate shifts", "All coral reefs gone" and "Gillette introduces 14 bladed razor".
- The Alt Text for 1036 reads: "I plugged in this lamp and my dog went rigid, spoke a sentence of perfect Akkadian, and then was hurled sideways through the picture window. Even worse, it's one of those lamps where the switch is on the cord."
- "There's no porn set atop storm chasing vans. No homoerotic spelling bees. No women playing electric guitar in the shower".
- Art Evolution: Compare the first 150 strips or so with the newer ones.
- Artistic License – History: One man tells the story of how Christopher Columbus sailed across the ocean to prove the world was round, and a woman butts in to change the story so he ends up in Valinor. When he tells her to stop making stuff up, she responds that he needs to stop making stuff up.
- Art Shift: A few strips actually shift up in terms of quality. The author doesn't seem to have a strong inclination to keep up such things though. On occasion, Randall has created temporary UNIX-themed and 3D-versions of the comic.
- 1021: "Business Plan" is hand-drawn, like the early strips were.
- 1021: "Business Plan"
- Art-Style Dissonance: It's surprisingly smart for its limited art style.
- Asbestos-Free Cereal: The "Free" strip, featuring three brands of cereal, with one of the being asbestos-free! Provides the page image for the trope and is the Trope Namer.
- Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Illustrated with a clever visual metaphor here.
- Author Appeal: Randall seems to really, really like cunnilingus, going so far as to create http://cu.nniling.us/ a redirect to xkcd itself
- Author Avatar: The plain-featured stick man. (Sometimes. It can also be just anyone without special features.) Also, this
- Author Filibuster: Quite a few on DRM, for example here. Eventually lampshaded here and here. This one provides a similar counterpoint, though it's not exactly a lampshade.
- Author Vocabulary Calendar: Wikipedia's propensity for using specific words over and over is discussed in the strip "Malamanteau".
- Badass Boast: Margaret makes one here
- Bavarian Fire Drill: Did you know you can just buy lab coats?
- Beware the Nice Ones:
- Our beret-clad Cloudcuckoolander makes some car-driving decisions.
- Stephenie Meyer. Seriously.
- Our beret-clad Cloudcuckoolander makes some car-driving decisions
- Big Electric Switch: In Time Machine, the time machine looks like some kind of vending machine with a Big Electric Switch on the front.
- Bilingual Bonus: Assuming you speak Binary... this strip.
- Each group of four bits represents one nibble (hexadecimal digit): 6261 7365 2032. Each pair of digits is the ASCII code for one character in "base 2".
- Each group of four bits represents one nibble (hexadecimal digit): 6261 7365 2032. Each pair of digits is the ASCII
- Bitter Wedding Speech: Hey, you asked me to do a toast...
- Black Comedy: On occasion.
- The Blank: All the characters.
- Bluff the Eavesdropper: In #525:Now and then, I announce "I know you're listening" to empty rooms. If I'm wrong, nobody knows, and if I'm right, maybe I just freaked the hell out of some secret organization.
- Body Horror: Subtly implicit in some, such as Eyelash Wish Log. Feb 5: Unlimited Eyelashes Feb 6: That wish granting entities be required to interpret wishes in accordance with the intent of the wisher.
- Boggles the Mind: "Scrabble"; on the prevalence of dirty words you find when playing family games.
- Bookcase Passage: "Bookshelf"; one that activates when you tug on the copy of Atlas Shrugged, though all it does is tell you that you have terrible taste.
- Bookends:
- The first panel and alt-text of this strip.
- The very first strip and the line on the very uttermost right of Click and Drag
- Time began and ended with a very small sandcastle.
- The first panel and alt-text of this strip.
- Brains and Bondage: Chemists pick the worst safewords.
- Brick Joke:
- Ongoing boomerang difficulties.
- The Journal joke, too.
- Does it count if they're only one comic apart?
- Then there's the bobcat. The reference in the latter two are in the Alt-Text. It shows up a fourth time in the alt-text of one of the images in this What If feature. He references it again with his 2014 Christmas shopping banner and inverts it in the alt text jere
- Tetris in 724 and 888.
- In The strip #349, we learn that trying to install FreeBSD has a chance of stranding one in the middle of the ocean. In Click and Drag, we have an ocean somewhere to the right, and there are two stick figures in the middle of it, complaining "Stupid FreeBSD..."
- ...Which comes up AGAIN even later, as a possible outcome in a "choose your own adventure" style comic.
- A very subtle one. Hat-Guy has a hat under his hat to one-up those who have their own hats. He shows up as a tiny little figure in a Guest Strip by Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal author Zach Weiner.
- The What If entry, Drain the World, had the Netherlands taking over the world as a Running Gag. The sequel, Drain the World II showed Mars being turned into "New Netherlands." Exoplanet Names 2 revealed that the Netherlands will continue to expand, establishing "Netherlands VI."
- Ongoing
- Buffy Speak:
- Up Goer Five is a cross between this and an inverted Expospeak Gag: it describes a Saturn V rocket using only the 1000 most-frequently-used words in the English language. Randall followed this up with "Thing Explainer", an entire book in this style.
- The first three panels of Winter are full of these.
- Up Goer Five
- Burma-Shave: Found here.
- Butterfly of Transformation: Pupating Transformers.
- But What About the Astronauts?: Addressed in "Nanobots", where a Grey Goo scenario is being observed from the space station.
- Call Back: Very popular, especially in the Alt Text.
- In "Useless", an early comic, a heart is inserted into various mathematical formulas ending in question marks. It was captioned "My normal approach is useless here." Five years later in "Probability", he wrote a strip about a terminally ill woman. The Alt Text reads, "My normal approach is useless here, too."
- Another in "Rogers St.", to "Little Bobby Tables" from "Exploits of a Mom"
- And again in "Exoplanet Names".
- And again in "Exoplanet Names
- Also, "Hell" and later, "Heaven".
- In "A-Minus-Minus", the Black Hat Guy sells an office chair on eBay, only for the actual package to arrive at the purchaser's home a bobcat. 251 comics later in "Packages", one character sets up a script that purchases something random off eBay every day so he can continually receive packages (notice the Alt Text). The bobcat gets mentioned yet again in "Coupon Code" (Alt Text again).
- In "Barrel - Part 1", the very first comic, a boy starts floating around in a barrel. In "Ferret", the author puts wings on a Ferret hoping he will fly. Eventually, the boy loses the barrel, and 11 comics later, in "Barrel - Part 5", is rescued by the winged ferret.
- The punchline for "Barrel - Part 1" is reused in Click and Drag", when you scroll all the way to the right.
- The punchline for "Barrel - Part 1" is reused in Click and Drag
- The man with the loud girlfriend and the elliptical dish from "Loud Sex" gets a mention in the Alt Text from "Bass".
- In "Forks and Spoons" scientists created fork/spork/spoon hybrids, with disastrous results. Only two comics later they are mentioned again in "Making Hash Browns".
- The inane statement in "Cat Proximity", "You're a kitty!" gets a callback in the mouseover for "Turtles" — "You're a turtle!".
- "Marshmallow Gun", where the water gun appears to be the same one from "Philosophy"
- Black Hat Guy's past exploits are brought up in "Secretary: Part 3".
- Electric skateboards are a recurring motif.
- So are giant hamster balls.
- "Lemme know if you find out why she's ordering all those colored plastic balls."
- In "Reload", the Alt Text says, "And watch out for that guy from comic #53." ("Hobby").
- Zeppelins
- Summer Glau:
- As a real paladin, he fights in the name of his fair lady in "Venting".
- He measures things by the silhouette which is always before his eyes in "Converting to Metric".
- Oh, hey, speaking of cat captions... I IZ "IN UR REALITY"!
- As a real paladin, he fights in the name of his fair lady in "Venting
- In "Circuit Diagram", the Alt Text remarks, "I just caught myself idly trying to work out what that resistor mass would actually be, and realized I had self-nerd-sniped." ("Nerd Sniping")
- At one point Munroe produced several strips about boomerang hijinks. Then, once we've all forgotten about them, we get this.
- A very subtle and easily missed one occurs in the Alt Text of "Exploits of a Mom", which references "Pi Equals".
- The comic Up Goer Five explains a space rocket with only the 1000 most common words used in English. It includes the phrase "you will not go to space today" for when something goes wrong. The What If? blag turned it into a running gag.
- In "Open Source", fake ninjas attack Richard Stallman in his sleep. Later, during "1337: Parts 4 and 5", he comes to Mrs. Robert aid.
- "Part 5" also sees the return of Cory Doctorow
- "Part 5" also sees the return of Cory Doctorow
- In "Just Alerting You" we see someone, possibly an early Megan, riding an Apatosaur. Then, in "Nowhere" we see her again riding an Apatosaur, this time in a daydream.
- The Tautology Club from "Honor Societies" is referenced in the Alt Text of "Linguistics Club".
- In "Useless
- Call to Adventure: "Interesting Life".Megan: You know how some people consider "May you have an interesting life" to be a curse?
Cueball: Yeah...
Megan: Fuck those people. Wanna have an adventure? - The Calls Are Coming from Inside the House: Spoofed.
- Calvinball: Metaball.
- The Cameo: Hannelore from Questionable Content can be found here.
- Car Fu: Actually Submarine Fu: Black Hat Guy recovers his hat from his Love Interest in this strip by crashing a Russian nuclear submarine through the ice she's skating on.
- Catapult Nightmare: The dream in 806, "Tech Support" starts out as a nightmare, but eventually it gets a Happy Ending. The catapult is still there at the end.
- Ceiling Corpse: This strip plays with the trope. It isn't so much a body as it is evidence of what's left of it...
- Centipede's Dilemma: "Did you know November is Tongue Awareness Month?"
- Centrifugal Farce: Argues whether or not this should be "centripetal force".
- Characterization Marches On: Early on, Beret Guy was more of an existentialist. He then shifted to being a bartender obsessed with bakeries, before finally settling into his Cloudcuckoolander self with "Pumpkin Carving".
- Chekhov's News: Suggested here to make the news more interesting.
- Chew Bubblegum: Parodied
- Children Are Innocent: Subverted, though partially doubly subverted when the child says "Gosh" in reaction.
- City Noir: The city this Wikipedia talk page is about seems to be this with all its bleak-looking pictures, murders and mining accidents.
- Cloudcuckoolander:I eat my body weight in food every thirty-one days. That's slightly faster than the human average. [stares off at the clouds then falls down] I'm part of the floor now.
- The Beret Guy can count as one as well.
- And maybe Randall himself...
- Coincidental Accidental Disguise: Apparently, having acne on half your face and flipping a coin is enough to fool Batman.
- Comedic Sociopath: Black Hat Guy.
- Comically Missing the Point:The white balance, for one.Focus is a bit too close.The chromatic aberration suggests you bought your camera because it had "the most megapixels"THE CAR IS ON FIRE!Maybe you should use the insurance money to get a new camera.
- Confronting Your Imposter: A stranger sneaks into the supreme court pretending to be one of the justices, despite all 9 justices present and accounted for. The stranger goes as far as to claim he's either Justice Alito or Ginsburg.
- Continuity Nod: See Call Back.
- Convection Schmonvection: Would someone please inform these kids of this trope. (It's not completely their fault; they're re-enacting the plot of Volcano.)
- Cool Shades: A derivative of this trope (with a reference to the CSI Quip to Black), as seen here.
- Cool Sword: This strip pokes fun at some of the flavors this trope comes in.
- Cordon Bleugh Chef: Genetic algorithms really should not be used to combine food ingredients.
- Correlation/Causation Gag: Apparently the WHO got the whole "cellphones cause cancer" thing backward.
- Counting Bullets: In a parody of Dirty Harry in this comic
- Crazy-Prepared:
- Can go wrong.
- Also found here.
- Can go wrong
- Creepypasta: Parodied here.
- Crossover: xkcd teams up with MinutePhysics to show you how to go to space using the ten hundred words used the most. And there are also In-Universe crossovers:
- HAL replaces Dave with someone who's more devoted to the whole science thing.
GLaDOS: But look at us here talking when there's science to do! Goodbye, Dave.- Asteroid - also huge Mood Whiplash.
Alt Text: My Deep Impact/Little Prince crossover fanfic has been poorly received by the community. - HAL replaces Dave
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Especially from a hypochondriac's point of view.
- Cuteness Proximity: Shown in the strip "Cat Proximity", which is the Trope Namer as well.
- Darker and Edgier : Played with in-universe by Harriet the Spy
- Date My Avatar: This strip demonstrates how the internet makes you appear smarter.
- Deathbringer the Adorable: This chart plots out scary names based on how scary the name is, and how scary the thing itself is. "Chernobyl Packet" and "Bomb Calorimeter" are considered this, while "Soil Liquefaction" and "Grey Goo" are cases of Fluffy the Terrible. "Flesh-Eating Bacteria" is in the corner for Names to Run Away from Really Fast.
- Deconstruction:
- A Degree in Useless: According to the Alt Text here, anthropology.
- Demand Overload: In universe. In an strip, a web site announcing the winner of the Compulsive Phone-Checking Championship crashes as a result of all the people checking to see if they won.
- Department of Redundancy Department: The Tautology Club is about redundancy because redundancy is what the Tautology Club is all about.
- Description Cut: Surely Nathan Fillion has better things to do these days than pretend to be Mal Reynolds. Meanwhile, wearing a brown coat, "Name's Captain Reynolds, ma'am." *ahem* "Name's Captain Reynolds, ma'am." Made even funnier by a certain episode of Castle
- Determinator:
- Devil's Advocate: Invoked but not used here. The trope itself is used without Name Drop in the Wright Brothers example.
- Did You Actually Believe...?
- Did You Just Scam Cthulhu?: Mephistopheles encounters the E.U.L.A
- Disproportionate Retribution: Lots. Here're three examples.
- Dissonant Serenity: Chess Photo features someone calmly posing with a chess board in their lap for a roller coaster photo while the other passengers scream their heads off like most people would.
- Distant Reaction Shot: Used in the comic Tuesdays (for "endless wings").
- Distracted from Death: In this strip a guy is so worried about this happening that he forces in sweet last words even when his love interest is just going to the grocery store.
- Dogged Nice Guy: Deconstructed here, with the whole "Nice Guy" situation being played uncharacteristically cynically.
- Don't Explain the Joke: The comic frequently violates this rule. In many cases, the punchline occurs in the second-to-last panel, only to have a final panel that then explains it. Other times the punchline is in the last panel... but there's a final sentence that then explains the joke. On the rare occasion neither are done, you can probably check the Alt Text and find it explained there.
- Don't Try This at Home: See the Alt Text for Wings. Subverted in a blog post: "But remember, I am not advocating doing anything dangerous unless it’s really cool."
- Double Entendre: "Geology: surprisingly erotic."
- Dream Apocalypse: "Please don't wake up. I don't want to die."
- Droste Image: This. And that - possibly worlds 1st truely infinite one.
- Drunken Master: In the form of Ballmer's Peak.
- Dying Alone
- Eagleland / Global Ignorance: Deconstructed in this strip.
- Early Installment Weirdness: Newcomers to the series will find it very strange that the first few dozen comics are actually just sketches and philosophical musings set to artwork. It wasn't until around 50 strips in that xkcd as we know it began to surface.
- Earth All Along: The "Time" comic, which updated once an hour for just over four months after posting, is set in some strange world where the inhabitants don't seem to know things that are common knowledge among humans, like how rivers work and why birds chirp. The reveal eventually showed that it's actually set in the distant future of what was once (and will soon become again) the Mediterranean Sea.
- Edit War: Discussed here, concerning the capitalization of Star Trek: Into Darkness. The proposal was to alternate between capital and lowercase letters as a compromise.
- Eldritch Abomination: This is why you shouldn't awaken the sheeple.
- Elemental Powers: Elements
- Elevator Gag: Floor 5: Zeppelin!
- Enhance Button: Superzoom
- Ennio Morricone Pastiche: Parodied in "Showdown". A showdown occurs between two cowboys at noon, a tumbleweed rolls by... then the tumbleweed pulls out dual revolvers and guns both the cowboys down.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Black Hat Guy and his girlfriend
- Even Evil Has Standards: While going over Black Hat Guy's (extensive) criminal record...Black Hat Guy: I plead the third.Congresswoman: You mean the fifth.Black Hat Guy: No, the third.Congresswoman: ...You refuse to quarter troops in your house?Black Hat Guy: I have few principles, but I stick to them.
- The Black Hat Man's companion does not condone his participation in the My Lai massacre.
- The Black Hat Man's companion
- Evolutionary Levels: Parodied in "Evolving", which uses a Pokémon style cut scene to show a disease-causing bacterium evolving into a drug-resistant variant.
- Exactly What I Aimed At: Apollo retroreflectors.
- Expospeak Gag: Somehow both inverted and played straight in the book Thing Explainer, where everything is explained in Buffy Speak— which can be thick enough to obfuscate what it's talking about. Standout examples include the "Sky Boat with Turning Wings" (helicopter), the "Shape Checker" that checks whether you have a piece of metal with a certain shape (cylinder lock), the "Box that Cleans Food Holders" (dishwasher), and the "Big Tiny Thing Hitter" (Large Hadron Collider).
F-J
- Facepalm: "Local g" offers an example (last panel).
- Failure Is the Only Option: This flow chart explains how to write good code, or possibly not.
- Fake-Out Opening: "The remaining 90 minutes of the movie will be a romantic comedy."
- False Cause: Several, though it is discussed here.
- Firefox and Witchcraft, as pointed out by Microsoft and the Christian Church.
- Cancer causes cellphones, though he is willing to reconsider with more data.
- A web site's visitors with Martha Stewart Living subscribers, and the Furry Fandom.
- Firefox and Witchcraft
- False Dichotomy: "Charity" discusses this.
- Fantasy Keepsake: This deconstruction of a Summon Everyman Hero fantasy — the protagonist has a thank-you gift which proves to him, but wouldn't prove to anyone else, that his adventures in another world were real.
- Fantasy Twist: This strip takes it to a very weird place.
- "Far Side" Island: If this strip is to be trusted, they're not half as boring as they're stereotyped.
- Feghoot
- 90 years worth of predictions for the future... only to end in an extremely lame meme.
- Lampshaded, then subverted here.
- 90 years worth of predictions for the future
- Fetish Retardant: In-universe, the Power Rangers theme is this.
- Filler Strip: Parodied.
- Flatworld: Here, in a reference to Flatland. (Bonus points for the Alt Text pointing out what a stick figure would look like in Flatland according to the book.)
- Flock of Wolves: What are the odds of five Ayn Rand fans being on the same train together?
- Flying Seafood Special: In "Click and Drag", a birdwatcher spots a giant jellyfish floating by.
- Four Point Scale: Strip 1098 explains the trope.
- Fox-Chicken-Grain Puzzle: Done with a wolf, goat and cabbage, it ends halfway through when the problem solver leaves the wolf behind, questioning why he had a wolf in the first place. The Alt Text goes a step further asking why there was a cabbage, taking only the goat, goats are fine.
- Funny Background Event:Bobby: Mom, I'm hungry.Mrs. Roberts: Hush, I'm coding. You ate yesterday.
- Fun with Homophones: #1704 takes quotes with the words "no man" and replaces them with "Gnome Ann".
- Gaslighting: AKA Stealth Carpentry
- Geeky Turn-On: Frequent, though with occasional unfortunate Manic Pixie Dream Girl overtones.
- Genre Shift: The remaining 90 minutes of the movie will be a romantic comedy.
- Giant Spider: While surprisingly literate, they aren't so good at pretending to be human.
- "Gift of the Magi" Plot: At least the result was the same.
- Girl in the Tower: This girl wants to be a lighthouse keeper because she gets to be the girl in the tower, only she's the one saving people.
- Girl-on-Girl Is Hot: Go go Gadget two lesbians doing it.
- Giving Up on Logic: Computer problems make a character pretty much drop the trope name here (Not a Trope Namer though, as the trope existed for years before that comic)
- Glasses Pull: Done by both Rick Astley and Isaac Newton for particularly dreadful puns.
- Glass-Shattering Sound: Attempted. It doesn't exactly go as planned.
- A God Am I:
- Godwin's Law: Referenced and parodied in this strip. Also, the suggested a screen consisting entirely of Hitler's face with flashing eyes would be preferable to Vista.
- Golden Mean Fallacy: Played for laughs here. The Alt Text explicitly states: "I believe the truth always lies halfway between the most extreme claims."
- Gone Horribly Right: The result of trying to be "the Walmart of social interaction" is...
- Gone Horribly Wrong: In this strip, upgrading a computer leads to being stranded out in the middle of the ocean
- A Good Name for a Rock Band:
- Or for a Tumblr.
- Inverted in the Alt Text: "Dot Tumblr Dot Com" would not make A Good Name for a Rock Band, due to potential confusion about its website.
- Gets skewered here, as well.
- Or for a Tumblr.
- Government Conspiracy: This open letter to whatever group or groups are secretly controlling the U.S. government telling them to get their shit together, it's embarrassing.note
- Gratuitous Iambic Pentameter: Strip 79, "Iambic Pentameter".
- Guest Strip: A week full of them, by the authors of Questionable Content, Buttercup Festival, Overcompensating, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and FoxTrot. Yes, Bill Amend did a guest strip.
- Hard on Soft Science: With some frequency. It also appears in the warning at the bottom of each page.
- Homeopathy is a soft target, but perhaps Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped.
- Inverted in Degree-Off, with a biologist giving a physicist a The Reason You Suck speech.
- Homeopathy
- Has Two Thumbs and...: Used in the Alt Text for Things You Learn.
- "Help! Help!" Trapped in Title Factory: How someone got trapped in a universe factory, we'll never know.
- Hitler's Time-Travel Exemption Act: Black Hat Guy uses a one-time-only time machine to go back and kill Hitler, at his friend's insistence. Only he did it in 1945, in the bunker, which is when and where Hitler actually died.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: "I just caught myself idly trying to work out what that resistor mass would actually be, and realized I had self-nerd-sniped." In-universe, the strip just before that one.
- Homage
- How We Got Here: Subverted in this one. It starts with a Record Needle Scratch over a chaotic scene, but rather than say something like "You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation", it says "You're probably wondering what that sound was. Well, long ago, music was recorded on vinyl discs..."
- Icarus Allusion: #1110, "Click and Drag", mentions Icarus. Really, it does. You'll have to look hard, though.
- I'd Tell You, but Then I'd Have to Kill You: Well, kill you even sooner.note
- In Case of X, Break Glass: In case of emergency, a glass repair kit.
- Incredibly Lame Pun:
- Rather blatantly in strips 282, 594, and 626.
- "I'm sorry if I hurt anthropology-major feelings with Friday's alt-text. I meant it as a friendly jibe at a cool field. I ... anthropologize."
- This one has two, one as the punchline and one in the Alt Text.
- 460: Palaeontology.
- A comic the author drew as a part of a game features Richard Wagner chasing a guy on his "Ring Cycle". He commented: "Why did I draw this?"
- Complex Conjugate. Oh my Eris...
- Not just your significant other. Your "statistically significant" other.
- This strip's Alt Text.
- 345: You'd make a wonderful dread pirate, Roberts.
- This. A lampshade is hung in the alt text.
- He thinks he drew this one to get back at people going through his stuff.
- They did this one on purpose.
- The alt text here, accompanied by a Glasses Pull.
- What are the thoughts of a wind turbine about making people fly by blowing air on them while they're holding up a kite? "I'm not a huge fan."
- Rather blatantly in strips 282
- Incredibly Obvious Bomb: It comes with a ''radioactive'' label.
- Infinite Canvas: Several of the comics, but taken to the extreme with Click and Drag.
- Information Wants to Be Free: With a mythological twist.
- Inherently Funny Words: The xkcd "blag".
- Insane Troll Logic: All over the place:
- Insignificant Little Blue Planet: Spoofed in Pale Blue Dot when the audience complains about the "blue dot" being an artifact on the photo.
- Instant A.I., Just Add Water: Very easy on Python! (as usual, Alt Text explains how)
- In the Style of...: Many of his parodies fit this trope a little closer.
- Inverted Trope: Well, if it were a trope...
- "It" Is Dehumanizing: Some jerkass uses this on a furry in "Aversion Fads".
- It Meant Something to Me: The spambot.
- I Thought Everyone Could Do That: Beret Guy is surprised to learn that other people can't tell what atoms are in objects just by looking at them. He wonders, "How do you tell what things are?"
- It Was His Sled: parodied.
- I Want My Jetpack:
- Replace "jetpack" with "flying car" and the trope name's quoted word-for-word.
- The Alt Text here starts with the trope name, but then Reality Ensues.
- 2016 Conversation Guide discusses the trope.
- Replace "jetpack" with "flying car" and the trope name's quoted word-for-word.
- I Will Find You: Find You
- Jerkass: Black Hat Guy.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: "No One Must Know".
- Jump Physics: Hoverboard is an interactive comic where you can move around with a hoverboard. It has all the classic platformer-physics in action. Also, you can jump arbitrary times in the air.
- "Jump Off a Bridge" Rebuttal: If all his friends jumped off a bridge it's probably because something bad is happening, like the bridge is on fire.
- Jumping the Shark: Played with in-universe in this strip's Alt Text.
K-O
- Kangaroos Represent Australia: A not-so-subtle instance in Thing Explainer. In a map of the Earth, Australia is simply labeled "Big Animals with Pockets".
- Kid Hero All Grown-Up: In this strip. Kid hero goes to another dimension, saves a kingdom, and now has to live with that knowledge for the rest of his life here on boring ol' Earth.
- Know Your Vines: Relationship after camping trip: strained.
- Laborious Laziness: Sometimes optimizing efficiency, automating a task, or figuring out the best approach takes more time and effort than just plowing ahead.
- Let Us Never Speak of This Again: Invoked in this Alt Text.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
- Lightbulb Joke: How many audiophiles...
- "L" Is for "Dyslexia": Double subverted in this strip. And then subverted a third time in the Alt Text.
- Literal-Minded: Shake what your mama gave you!
- The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday: "Startup Opportunity" ponders the idea of disrupting the industry of Little Shots That Weren't There Yesterday. Also, Beret Guy says he gets his groceries from them.
- Logic Bomb: Used several times, but this one's for the audience.
- Logical Fallacies:
- An intentional example in 'Extrapolation'
- Lampshaded here, in the "Principle of Explosion" comic.
- An intentional example in 'Extrapolation'
- Loud of War: Several strips have featured inventive audio revenge on loud car stereos and neighbours who are loud in bed.
- Loophole Abuse:
- "There's no rule on the books saying a meerkat can't play rugby." Though, according to the Alt Text, there are rules against gorillas and golden retrievers.
- In one of Black Hat's schemes, he takes the observation that standard internet server racks and beehive frames are both 19 inches and have similar pitches and runs with it, noting that most web hosting TOSes* don't mention beehives in what's not allowed. The Alt Text calls back to the example listed above, noting that most TOSes also don't prevent dogs from playing baseball in the server facility.
- Played with in #1593, where Beret Guy seems to believe that stealing a base in baseball is loophole abuse. His reaction is, "Everyone's real mad but I guess they checked the rules and there's nothing that says he can't do that."
- "There's no rule on the books saying a meerkat can't play rugby."
- Love Allegory: Katamari.
- Love You and Everybody: I love the whole world.
- Magical Particle Accelerator: Not surprisingly, Large Hadron Collider. The bored scientists use it to give a helicpoter cancer.
- Major General Song: "Every Major's Terrible", which is about choosing a course and how the person can't/won't/doesn't want to do any of them. Someone sang the whole comic (with accompaniment) here.
- Note that the video was released within hours of the comic. Say what you will about XKCD's fandom, but damn.
- Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Most characters in the strip, male and female, have a strong devotion to making life a little weirder from the start, including Black Hat Guy, so at least by real-world standards, the recurring female character can come off as one, such as in #308.
- The appeal of this trope is parodied in comic 122: "I didn't actually mean be different. I just want silly and entertaining on command now and then."
- The appeal of this trope is parodied in comic 122
- The Masochism Tango: Black Hat Guy and his girlfriend. He blew up her car, for Chrissakes. By moving the mines she had set up to blow up his car. She stole his hat. He likes his hat.
- Measuring the Marigolds: Subverted in "Beauty". Yes, scientists find beauty and wonder in their work. It's just not always what everyone else thinks of as beautiful.
- Michael Bay: Knows the worst-case scenario.
- Mighty Glacier: Used literally in "Digital Rights Management".Black Hat Guy: Let's make a deal. You stop trying to tell me where, when, and how I play my movies and music, and I won't crush your homes under my inexorably advancing wall of ice.
- Mind Screw:
- Here. Just so you understand how weird this is, the guy on the right is talking to the past, and it's talking back.
- This strip starts out fairly normal. Then the whole world falls apart all of a sudden.
- The small print about "the algorithm" on the home page might also qualify as either an example or a parody:We did not invent the algorithm. The algorithm consistently finds Jesus. The algorithm killed Jeeves.note . The algorithm is Banned in China. The algorithm is from Jersey. The algorithm constantly finds Jesus. This is not the algorithm. This is close.
The story behind that is as follows: In 2007, some billboards popped up in New York with those sentences on them, as part of an apparent viral marketing campaign by ask.com. However, they apparently didn't finish it; the phrases didn't return anything relevant on Google. Randall decided to exploit this by having the many bloggers in his fanbase post the sentences as links to xkcd.com. He added them to the site itself so that the effort wouldn't be misinterpreted as an attempted Googlebomb. It worked; if you Google the phrases, the top results are all references to xkcd. - "Perhaps this could change your mind?" It's like something straight out of The Twilight Zone.
- Here.
- Mood Whiplash: Too many to fully enumerate. Some examples:
- A sad shift from something romantic to the complete opposite.
- "Dark Flow" segues from a Your Mom gag to something rather heartbreaking.
- A sad shift
- Moon-Landing Hoax: A few comics about the topic.
- More Than Three Dimensions: In strip #721, Cueball apologizes to a two-dimensional square named A. Square for having given him a hard time when he had trouble understanding three-dimensional space. Playing a four-dimensional game called Miegakure has made Cueball more sympathetic to Square's situation.
- Motive Decay: The second Manhattan Project starts out as an attempt to cure cancer, but ends up replicating the original Manhattan Project exactly.
- Mundane Made Awesome: In the xkcd-Verse, computer science is revered as if it were a martial art. The 1337 story arc is a good example.
- Making a sandwich! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!
- Making a sandwich! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!
- Mundane Utility:
- Frequently, including lasers to zap squirrels.
- Also, using the LHC to cause cancer in helicopters.
- Possibly the worst one yet: using Narnia as a literal garbage dump.
- Frequently, including lasers to zap squirrels
- Mundane Wish: Done in this strip.
- My Grandson Myself: Implied by the Alt Text of "Mystery Solved", which claims that "Jimmy Hoffa currently heads the Teamsters Union — he just started going by 'James'." (Jimmy Hoffa's son James P. Hoffa is the actual current head of the Teamsters Union.)
- Nameless Narrative: Most of the names of recurring characters were never clearly stated.
- Averted with 'Megan'
- The alt text of the Actuarial strip names the Black Hat Guy as "Hat guy."
- The Author Avatar may be named Rob.
- Never Bareheaded: Black Hat Guy. Except the one time his hat was stolen.
- Nightmare Fuel: Velociraptors, in-universe.
- Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot:
- "Comic Fragment". God knows how it all fits together, but it sounds great.
- Examined further in "Trochee Fixation".
- "Comic Fragment"
- Noodle Implements: Invoked here, to the dismay of the characters.
- Nonhuman Undead: The Opportunity Rover evolved into this.
- Noodle Incident:
- Whatever the rest of "Comic fragment" was.
- Also, he somehow managed to go from upgrading a computer to being stranded out in the middle of the ocean surrounded by sharks.
- Then we have #521. Start with trying to one-up some christmas light displays on Youtube. End up fighting raptors with lightsabers, Bill Gates killing Santa, and finally cutting down the Yggdrasil as a Christmas tree.
- And however he lost his genetics, rocketry, and stripping licenses in one go.
- The "Apollo 12 rum incident" seems to qualify. No consensus has been reached yet about the nature of said incident, how it relates to harpoons, or whether it actually happened or was made up by Randall.
- In City Talk Pages the actual contents of the said Wikipedia article is this.
- Whatever the rest of "Comic fragment"
- Office Sports: What programmers get up to while their code's compiling.
- Off the Chart:
- This comic describing The Star Wars Holiday Special; not just bad, not even So Bad, It's Good, just a bottomless abyss.
- This comic says "Logarithmic scales are for quitters who don't bother with getting enough paper to display their charts properly".
- This
- Oh, Crap!: As said by Michael Phelps.
- Older Than They Think: (In-Universe) With the rapid pace of technology and information, everyone assumes that conversation is dying, newspapers are becoming sensationalist garbage, the sanctity of marriage is being threatened, society is collapsing, and things were better in the old days. This comic shows that people have been believing this for over a century.
- Only the Chosen May Wield: Deconstructed here. Megan pulls out a sword out of the stone, and thus is crowned the ruler of England, but then she decides to put the sword back in because she doesn't want the burden of having to rule a kingdom."That seems like an awful lot of hassle when all I wanted was a cool sword."
- Ontological Mystery: #505 starts with this, and then puts another layer on top.
- The Operators Must Be Crazy: #1438 posits what would happen if mission control acted like indifferent telephone service operators during the Apollo 13 disaster; the operator doesn't care about their emergency, makes snarky comments when they try to explain their plight, and brushes them off in favor of a call from his mother.
- Organ Theft: Inverted in #914. His ice is stolen... and he wakes up in a bathtub full of kidneys, rather than the other way 'round.
- Overcomplicated Menu Order: Xkcd orders $15.05 worth of appetizers, expecting the waiter to figure out what quantities of which items to serve in order to reach that number. The joke is that the costs listed on the menu just happen to mean that the waiter is being asked to solve a complex mathematical problem.
- Overly Long Gag:
- On TV Tropes
- Significant, which even combines this with Overly Pre-Prepared Gag.
- Expect to burst out laughing several times during #1110. Not from the little tidbits in it, but from scrolling through it and finding you're still scrolling but it's not ending!
- That or simply stare in awe with mouth agape while thinking about how long that had to have taken to make...
- Many pages in the What-If blog have these, but this one deserves a special mention, combining this with a constantly returning Brick Joke.
White Hat Guy: "I even tried making a big show of putting on headphones, but he just KEPT TALKING." - On TV Tropes
- Overly Narrow Superlative: "I love you most out of all the girls in all the world who love me back." May double as a False Reassurance.
- And subverted in Bill Amend's guest strip:
- And subverted in Bill Amend's guest strip
- Overly Pre-Prepared Gag: Just shy of a hundred years of Googled predictions for the future, until you get to 2101.
- Time may count as both this and Overly Long Gag: the image on the strip page changes every hour, forming a stop-motion video with narrative when combined on external sites such as this one. People discussing it on the forums initially assumed it would go on for a few days, it went beyond that. Then it seemed logical that it would conclude at the end of the week, with a punchline on April 1st. When it became clear that the story was of two people building a sandcastle on the beach, the most common prediction was that upon finishing the sandcastle the tide would wash it away and the scene loop to the beginning, forming a metaphor of some sort. Eventually the castle was finished and the tide did wash it away, the scene fading to white... only for a brand new scene to start, two people now on a quest to find out how seas and river and everything else works! It went on for over four months, updating each hour, and finally ended on July 26, 2013.
- Time
P-T
- Pac Man Fever: The subject of the fall-guy's ire's cellphone is making sounds more appropriate to a machine from the era he's actually referring to.
- Paranoia Gambit: Black Hat Guy hires Rick Astley to show up at a party and...just stand around not breaking into song. His victim quickly snaps and flees the room.
- Parking Payback: "Police reported three dozen cheerful bystanders, yet no one claims to have seen who did it."
- Parody Sue: Gnome Ann. Take every quote with "no man" in them, replace "no man" with "Gnome Ann", and you get what Gnome Ann is like."Time and tide wait for Gnome Ann."
"The wicked flee when Gnome Ann pursueth."
"Time ripens all things; Gnome Ann is born wise." - Parting Words Regret: Discussed in Leaving.
- Patchwork Map: In Geography Randall wants to live on an example map of geography books.
- Person with the Clothing: Black Hat Guy.
- Pizza Boy Special Delivery: Subverted.
- Planet of Steves: The Alt Text for Hurricane Names reveals that with the English and Greek alphabets and the Oxford English Dictionary exhausted, and the subsequent storms proving to be uncountably infinite, the NOAA gives up and names all the remaining hurricanes "Steve".Your local forecast is "Steve". Good luck.
- Pluto Is Expendable: Refernces several times:
- 1551 proposes an unorthodox solution by reclassifying it as "dwarf Pluto".
- 1555 tries to make matters even more confusing by assigning the name "Pluto" to an actual planet located in a different solar system.
- 1020 subverts this trope: the first two panels seem like a typical Pluto controversy, but the third reveal it to be something else entirely.
- It also has a mention in 473:
She threw me me out yelling, "You don't say those words. Not in this house." It's been two years. I thought the wounds had healed. But I stand by what I said: Pluto should never have been a planet. - 1551
- Poe's Law: Referenced here.
- Poor Communication Kills: Demonstrated here.
- Porn Names: Discussed here.
- Power Perversion Potential: 3D printers.
- Precision F-Strike : Mission. FUCKING. Accomplished!
- Also: What a goshdarned CUNT
- Also: What a goshdarned CUNT
- Premature Aggravation: 439, "Thinking Ahead". "Did he just go crazy and jump out the window?"
- Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Five of them, ranked by the likelihood of catching on.
- The Presents Were Never from Santa: He's an agent for the "forces working beneath the chaos of life"...or maybe not.
- Public Secret Message: This strip makes fun of the public messages in Redwall.
- Punctuated! For! Emphasis!:
- Quip to Black: Here. (The CSI meme version.)
- Quote Mine: Claimed to happen in the Alt Text of World War III+.
- Rain of Arrows: Agincourt Gambit
- Really Gets Around: Touched on here.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Given by the target of a pickup artist in this strip.
- Record Needle Scratch:
- Apparently a good name for your daughter.
- This comic lampshades the outdatedness of the trope.
- Apparently a good name for your daughter
- Red Pill, Blue Pill: parodied.
- Reference Overdosed: Many comics require the reader to know the reference to get the joke.
- Remix Comic: the forum-produced Making XKCD Slightly Worse. Notable is the fact that the spin-off comic has more than three times the number of strips than the original.
- Repeating so the Audience Can Hear: This one. Lampshaded by the Alt Text.
- Retirony: This strip shows an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to defy the trope, with an officer dying the day before his last day on the job, when the department locks retiring officers into a heavily protected room for that day.
- Retro Rocket: The spaceship in this strip looks like a potato with fins.
- Reverse Psychology: Black Hat Guy warns vandals not to mess with his jack-o-lantern.
- Riding the Bomb: In one part of Hoverboard, Beret Guy rides a torpedo (a regular one, because they have no photon torpedoes).
- Rickroll:
- Mentioned several times. This strip actually includes the opening score, making for what has to be the most subtle Rickroll ever (unless you can read music).
- They actually rickrolled Rick Astley
- Subverted in this strip — they hire Rick Astley to show up at a party and not sing. Complete with Glasses Pull and Quip to Black.
- "They kept Rickrolling me! It was only fair."
- Mentioned several times. This strip
- Right Behind Me: This person wants to shoot for the moon, as in with guns, rockets and the like, hoping to destroy that stupid "skycircle". While talking about it, she realizes why her group is acting funny.
- Right Through the Wall: With an elliptical reflector dish.
- Road Sign Reversal: In "Astronaut Vandalism", with a twist.
- Rule Number One: The first rule of the tautology club is first rule of the tautology club.
- Rule 34: If there are no actual Strunk/White erotic fanfictions out there now, there probably will be as a direct result of this comic.
- Running Gag:
- Cory Doctorow blogging in a hot air balloon from the blogosphere.
- Raptors
- "My Hobby". Apparently, this guy has about a million different hobbies, give or take a few. (Full list)
- Mailing people bobcats, which started in 325, and was referenced in the title text in two subsequent comics. More recently, during the 2013 holiday season, the XKCD store stated, "I will probably not send you a bobcat" in the main page link.
- In the "what if" section of the website, the Netherlands is often seen as a superpower, from conquering the world as Munroe explains what happens if the oceans started to drain to having colonized Mars.
- In this comic (released 24 July 2015), Munroe revels in listing a lot of his old running gags, including the Blogosphere (from the Doctorow comics), the Netherlands, and Sulawesi (which he included in his famous "Map of the Internet" comics).
- Sarcasm Mode: "Try an Internet petition drive — those totally work."
- Scenery Porn: There are several strips that have good visuals in them, such as United Shapes, but the absolute ginormous size of "Click and drag" takes this trope way past root 121.
- Then Hoverboard takes it up to infinity. "You've found all the coins" indeed.
- Then Hoverboard
- Schmuck Bait: "Jeffrey is famous as the picture on the Wikipedia article on 'Necrosis'"
- Science Is Wrong: "No one told you because you're cute when you get into something."
- The Scream: How people react to endless wings.
- Selfcest: You'd think this is going somewhere dramatic, but no.
- Self-Deprecation: One way to interpret this strip.
- The hipster graph notes that the graph itself is "making it all worse."
- The hipster graph
- Self-Imposed Challenge: A rare non-video game example: This strip inspired an actual Flash implementation of the game. It's pretty unplayable (that's kind of the point) with the usual Tetris goals, but a MeFite pointed out the game is actually interesting and reasonably challenging if you try to end the game with as few pieces as you can.
- Serial Escalation: There are poster sized comics. There's one or two wall sized comics. But #1110 is so big it probably wouldn't fit on the floor of a passenger jet hangar. It's 165888 pixels wide by 79872 pixels high (roughly 46'/12m wide by 22'/6m tall at 300DPI). The stick figures are about half an inch tall in a world that is to them 5 miles across. Trying to find everything in it is likely to take at least half an hour.
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Wikipedia's propensity for this is discussed in the strip "Malamanteau".
- Sexy Shirt Switch: At the bottom of #819, that girl in biology class wearing one of your shirts rates 4 (out of 4) stars on the hotness meter. That girl in biology class wearing one of your mother's shirts rates a Flat "What.".
- Shaped Like Itself:
- Shout-Out:
- Many, but of particular note is this one. It gets worse. Click the comic itself.
- Earlier than that, we have "In Popular Culture". It's very subtle, but take a look at the works listed as examples. Any of them look familiar?
- Calvin and Hobbes say Hi. And again (this one also contains Shout Outs to Rocky and Bullwinkle and The Lord of the Rings).
- In the first "1337" comic, one character poses the question, "How does she type with oven mitts on?" This is a reference to a frequently asked question on Homestar Runner's Strong Bad emails, and possibly also a reference to his "training gloves" in the site's "In Search of the Yello Dello" toon.
- The final "1337" comic has the line "You'd make a great dread pirate, Roberts."
- Several comics reference Ender's Game.
- The Alt Text on this one is a reference to an obscure detail in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
- Strip 574 "Swine Flu":
- Hannelore's twitter account is one of the tweeters.
- It also has someone asking how long it'll take the flu to reach Madagascar.
- "Craigslist Apartments" has a few notable addresses, including one house on scenic Ash Tree Lane.
- Strip Games. See the Alt Text? Right.
- Black Hat is based on Aram from Men in Hats in many ways.
- Douglas Hofstadter and his recursiveness.
- Jason Fox makes a cameo appearance in this strip.
- The Alt Text of this strip is "We have met the enemy and he is us".
- Gravity Wells has a couple of things in Titan going "weeoooeeooo".
- Click and Drag:
- The falling whale is a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
- A Creeper can be found in one of the caves, chasing someone with a pickaxe.
- A part of the scenery is the classic world 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. 1.
- Two X-wings can be spotted, one taking off from a cave and one in the sky.
- In one spot of the map, a woman can be seen ignoring her friend's warning and going into the tall grass, saying "Pikachu, I choose death -- and with it, immortality."
- Hey! you're doing science. And you're still alive
- Big Brother realizes he's trapped in the worst possible hell...
- One of the contenders for the awful ringtone championship was "That noise from Dumb and Dumber."
- The Alt Text for this strip references the Helvetica Scenario.
- While the entirety of Wait Wait is a reference to the news quiz Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me! if you look closely, one of the articles also quotes Peter Sagal as saying "I aten't dead."
- This strip has some suspiciously familiar file extensions strung together in the bottom line.
- In the "Jurassic World" strip, apart from the obvious reference to Jurassic World, the punchline is that the reconstructed dinosaur is T-Rex from Dinosaur Comics (and as a bonus, he's depicted in the same pose he always stands in when delivering a punchline).
- To The Lion King here.
- Hoverboard is loaded with Star Wars references (probably because of the upcoming release of The Force Awakens). There's also more well-hidden references to Star Trek, The Ring, Steven Universe, Hamlet, Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias", Prince of Persia, and more. It's Click and Drag all over again...
- Centrifugal Force mixes the most famous scene in Goldfinger with a classic physics debate.
- This one is a very dark shoutout to Car Talk.
- In #1665, a guy suggests a new image for a Wikipedia city page. Another guy points out that the proposed image is a screenshot of Zootopia.
- The "British Map labeled an American" has lots of these, including "Everdeen" and "FHQWGADS"
- Many, but of particular note is this one
- Sickeningly Sweethearts: Black Hat Guy and his equally sociopathic girlfriend, when they think no one's watching. God help you if you catch them at it.
- Silent Scenery Panel: The occasional landscape drawings.
- Skewed Priorities: As the Apocalypse unfolds around him, Cueball's first priority is to get himself the Erdos number of 1.
- Slaying Mantis: Don't forget to call the right superhero.
- Slow-Loading Internet Image: Discussed in this comic.
- Smart People Play Chess: On roller coasters, no less.
- Snowy Screen of Death: With a screensaver.
- So Bad, It's Horrible: Conversed here.
- Something Only They Would Say: How to get access to a server.
- Something Person: Etymology-man!
- Sophisticated as Hell:
- Strip 36
- And this one
- This happens a lot. Check this strip.
- Strip 36
- Space Elevator: After countless engineers / spend trillions over fifty years, / a modern Babel disappears / because some fuck brought pruning shears.
- Spaceship Slingshot Stunt: Six Words has one planned.
- Space Whale Aesop: This is what happens when you use GOTO.
- Special Edition Title: On October 26, 2009, the site was temporarily redesigned in a retraux early 90's style in dubious honor of the end of Geocities. Complete with broken HTML!◊
- Spin the Earth Backwards: Sort of.
- Spy Speak: Parodied.
- Stalker with a Crush / Dogged Nice Guy: Once again, Strip 513. You'll understand.
- Starfish Alien: Whatever the entity in Steroids is.
- The Stars Are Going Out: Invoked in this strip.The point is that there are too many stars. It's been freaking me out.
- Stealth Pun:
- Ahem.
- This strip.
- In this strip, where an audience member lampshades its use.
- In this strip, beneath Black Hat Guy's tool bench is a box labelled "drills" and a box labelled "non-drills".
- In this strip: "Haiku? It's an experimental OS that I... oh, never mind." Now try counting the syllables.
- The Alt Text in this strip asks, "When you talk about the job experience you'll give me, why do you pronounce Job with a long 'o'?" This is a reference to the Biblical figure Job, whose story centers on him being tormented with sickness while maintaining his faith in God.
- Ahem
- Stick Figure Comic
- "Stop Having Fun" Guys: Trope Namer. This strip shows a guy deriding a few people playing Rock Band, telling them it doesn't make them cool ... even though they're having fun.
- Stuffed into the Fridge: The combined volume of Summer Glau, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul is less than the volume of the fridge! Here.
- Stupid Question Bait: A press conference about an asteroid heading towards Earth gets sidetracked by reporters asking about what role Social Media has played.
- Swallowed a Fly: This strip, referencing a similar example in Serenity.
- Swivel-Chair Antics: Graphed.
- Take That!:
- As required for any "real" computer user, the strip hates Windows, especially Vista.
- Computational linguists are also targeted occasionally. Because fuck computational linguistics. In the Alt Text:Chomskyists, generative linguists, and Ryan North, your days are numbered.
- While all those are often partially tongue in cheek, DRM gets searing loads of venom.
- Randall also makes his views on string theory fairly clear. Brains vs string theorists is a very Old Pun.
- Fuck grapefruit. Fuck coconuts.
- This for people who endlessly parrot Python.
- Fuck literary criticism, philosophy, anthropology, psychology... basically, any field that isn't physics, mathematics, or computer science.
- He has also declared war on chemists, though that's more a grudging rivalry than a belittlement.
- With some exceptions, like the one against homeopathy, the Take Thats are usually intended to be in jest. Occasionally the comic doesn't make this entirely clear; notably, the one against anthropology majors was so widely seen as a serious insult to the field that the author later issued an apology for it, as noted above under Incredibly Lame Pun.
- Fuck the cosine
- Console Lines. Xbox / Playstation fanboys are jerks. Nintendo fans will give you a hug, though.
- Fuck Cancer.
- "Suckville is considered by the Census Bureau to be part of the Detroit Metropolitan statistical area, despite not being located anywhere near Detroit."
- There's one against Atlas Shrugged here.
- Another Alt Text one: "I've been trying for a couple of years now, but I haven't been able to come up with a name dumber than 'Renesmee'."
- "Slideshow" attacks websites featuring slideshows utilizing the Ken Burns effect.
- A truly well-deserved one towards Youtube comments sections.
- One towards internet misogynists.
- Talk About the Weather: Weather geeks HATE this trope.
- Talking Your Way Out: Inverted. The superintelligent AI is so convincing, it convinces the Black Hat Guy to let him back into the box.
- Telepathic Sprinklers: "Pool on the roof must've sprung a leak."
- Tempting Fate: A couple times in this strip."Are the raptors contained?" "Sure. Unless they figure out how to build lightsabers."
- Terrible Ticking: Unn-tss, unn-tss, unn-tss...
- That Cloud Looks Like...: Cueball asks Megan what she sees in a cloud, but she instead points her cell phone at it and uses Google's image search to identify it. Google says it's a cloud, Cueball is unimpressed.
- The Last of These Is Not Like the Others: Cueball and friends try to come up with a word to fill the Kix slogan "Kid Tested, Mother...". Their failed attempts include "Selected", "Perfected", "Not Notified", "Watching Helplessly", "Infected", "Consumed", and "Fucker".
- There Are No Girls on the Internet: This strip addresses the author's theories about the reason for that.
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks: In-universe example.
- This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: Science. It works, bitches.
- Threatening Shark: Just imagine what would ensue if this comic ever reached the folks behind Sharknado.
- Three-Laws Compliant: Shows what happens when the order of those three laws is messed with in this strip.
- Title Drop: Alt Text drop, actually. From "Time": "We need to run."
- To Be Lawful or Good: He chooses lawful.
- Too Dumb to Live: In this comic, a girl runs up to a man named Rob and tells him:"Remember last week when we dug up all those Indian bones and made puppets out of them? It turns out they were buried over an ancient Indian burial ground!"
- The Topic of Cancer: Shows up in more than a few strips, as Randall Monroe's now-wife had been diagnosed with stage-3 breast cancer during their engagement.
- Tradesnark™: In this comic's alt text after the spambot is found out:"Fine, walk away. I'm gonna go cry into a pint of Ben&Jerry's Brownie Batter(tm) ice cream [link], then take out my frustration on a variety of great flash games from PopCap Games(r) [link]."
- Truth in Television: The "Get out of my head Randall!" meme where many of the comics are applicable to the everyday lives of the readers.
- Turing Test: The examiner is now questioning his own humanity.
- TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life: Possibly the first actual work to use this?
- Twice Shy: This strip. And again.
- Deconstructed (sort of) and subverted.
- Deconstructed
U-Z
- Unholy Matrimony: Black Hat Guy acquires a girlfriend in a mini-arc who shares similar interests and is more than a match for him. She comes up again, but slightly more rarely than he does.
- Un Installment: 404
- The Unpronounceable: U+202e.
- Interestingly, in the 'archive' page, all comics after that strip are displayed Right-to-Left.
- Unsound Effect:
- Unwinnable Joke Game: There's a strip about Tetris. Predictably, someone on the internet made a game like that. And some managed to score lines in it.
- Up to Eleven: The basis of 670.
- Vanity License Plate: The tendency of such plates to be owned by pretentious rich jerks is parodied, and Black Hat Guy claims another victim.
- One guy tries to fool people by getting a vanity plate consisting of 1's and I's, thinking he can commit crimes with impunity as no one will be able to correctly record his plate number. This backfires on him in that he's the only one with a license plate like this, so the cops can find him easily; and the Alt Text suggests his girlfriend gets a similar plate so that she can commit crimes that he'll get blamed for.
- One guy tries to fool people by getting a vanity plate consisting of 1's and I's
- Viewers Are Geniuses: One of the biggest practitioners. The strip often bases comics on obscure math, physics, or computer jokes. This has gotten less common over time, and the forums are very useful. You may need to be knowledgeable in several possibly obscure or complicated fields to completely get some of the earlier ones. For example, computer programing, meteorology, cosmic rays, and tao philosophy. Really.
- Another example: Hand this to an electronics technician, and just sit back and watch the laughter.
- Another example: Hand this
- Visible Silence: E.g. the end of this strip
- Visual Pun: This comic features a literal tarbomb.
- Walking Techbane: Here http://www.xkcd.com/1586/
- We All Live in America: The old World According To Americans "map of ignorance/prejudice" gag is subverted when the Americans asked turn out to be "unexpectedly good at geography" and also aware of the holes in their knowledge.
- This one subverts it by showing that America has not always been considered the centre of the world.
- This one
- We Are as Mayflies: To the time vultures, at any rate.
- Weasel Words: Randall has a bone to pick with Newscasters who use "one of the [X]" instead of "the [X]" when they aren't 100% certain to the validity of a claim, they get so used to hedging their speech that they use it in cases where they can be 100% certain, and the weasel words just ruin what they are saying.
- Weird Currency: Here.
- Wham Episode: Randall reveals that due to illness in the family, the next few weeks are going to be filler. Normal updates resume. Then five months later, he gives us a Tear Jerker with a heart-breaking Ironic Echo. (His now-wife is doing just fine, though.)
- From "Time": "The ocean is coming."◊
- From "Time": "The ocean is coming."
- Wham Line: "Never"."I know that no matter where I go or who I build a life with, I will never have with anyone what I had with you. Thank God."
- What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: My normal approach is useless here.
- What Measure Is a Mook?: Done via FPS mod.
- When All You Have Is a Hammer: Parodied.
- Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: This comic points this out, specifically with regards to zombie movies that start in labs.
- Why We Can't Have Nice Things: You could argue that it's subverted in the Alt-text... but not by much.
- Wiki Vandal: Wikipedia articles are frequently defaced whenever a relevant topic is mentioned, as this blog documents.
- Wiki Walk:
- Wishing for More Wishes: In this strip, the "Wish Bureau" keeps an ongoing log of Black Hat's clever attempts to get extra wishes, including wishing for "a universe which is an exact replica of this one sans rules against meta-wishes."
- Women Are Wiser: The women usually play the more sensible part in the comic.
- Word Puree Title: Explained here.
- Word-Salad Humor: Done in "Laser Products"
- The World Is Just Awesome: In general, the frequent invocations of interesting bits of science. In particular, xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel and Click and Drag make the point that it's a big world full of fun and wonder.
- World War Whatever: World War III+ makes fun of Einstein's (or whoever's) famous quote. It continues past World War IV though XIV, and tells us the exact kind of weapons used in those wars.
- X Called; They Want Their Y Back: Interrupted here due to Sarcasm Blindness (or maybe the guy's just snarking back).
- Parodied here, where they didn't leave a message on voicemail. To leave a message, press '1'. (Rather hard to do on a rotary phone.)
- Umwelt has two variants that also parody the trope, one for using Maxthon Cloud Browser and another for using Netscape Navigator.Maxthon: "Maxthon? Hey, 2005 called. Didn't say anything. All I could hear was sobbing."Netscape: "Netscape Navigator? Hey, the nineties called - drunk, as usual. I hung up without saying anything."
- Parodied here
- X Days Since: 38 days since someone reset this sign.
- Xtreme Kool Letterz:
- Illustrated in Car Model Names. Note that X and Z are the top two.
- Life Goals collects a whole list of these. The Alt Text lampshades the comic title using this trope.
- Illustrated in Car Model Names
- Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe:
- Voynich Manuscript produces such a conversation from 500 years ago.
- Period Speech combine this with modern slang (and other anachronisms) to make fun of period pieces.
- Voynich Manuscript
- You Answered Your Own Question: Happens here
- Your Brain Won't Be Much of a Meal: When Zombie Feynman wants brains after explaining how MythBusters are true science:Person: Try the physics lab next door.
Zombie Feynman: I said BRAINS. All they've got are string theorists. - Your Mom: Played with frequently. The trope is also used. Subverted here. Is in the Alt Text here and here.
- Mrs. Roberts defaces websites of people who tell these jokes to her daughter.
- Another one, and still another
- She apparently has a deeper gravity well than Saturn.
- Included in the pile of Hiroshima as a Unit of Measure comparisons. She weighs 200 kgs, (220 with cheap jewelery and 223 with cheap jewelery and makeup)
- Mrs. Roberts
- Zeppelins from Another World
- Zerg Rush: Due to the popularity of xkcd, it's common to click on links and watch counts skyrocket. This is more apparent on "What if?", which has at least one outside link and a couple of PDFs per post. One of the most common comments in any of them is "xkcd army reporting in!"
- Zonk: The beret guy appears on a nameless game show based on the classic two-goats-and-a-car problem and wins a goat. Instead of going for the car, he takes the goat and says he has an overgrown yard.
