FOR a certain subset of Internet users, “Sudo make me a sandwich” may as well be “Take my wife ... please.”
Perhaps some explanation is in order. Before giving up the goods, however, we should heed the warning of Randall Munroe, the 23-year-old creator of xkcd, a hugely popular online comic strip (at least among computer programmers) where the sandwich line appeared. Mr. Munroe believes that analyzing a joke is like dissecting a frog — it can be done, but the frog dies.
Still, he plays along, explaining that “sudo” is a command in the Unix operating system that temporarily grants godlike powers: “The humor comes from people who have encountered typing a command and having the computer say ‘No,’ and they say, ‘Oh, yeah, sudo says,’ and the computer does it. Kind of like ‘Simon says.’ ”
Hence the set-up: one stick figure says to another, “Make me a sandwich,” only to be told, “No.” Thinking quickly, stick figure No. 1 says, “Sudo make me a sandwich,” and the once-recalcitrant stick figure No. 2 must comply.
Mr. Munroe, a physics major and a programmer by trade, is good for jokes like this three times a week, informed by computing and the Internet. By speaking the language of geeks — many a strip hinges on crucial differences between the C and Python programming languages — while dealing with relationships and the meaning of a computer-centric life, xkcd has become required reading for techies across the world.
The site, which began publishing regularly in January 2006, has 500,000 unique visitors a day, he said, and 80 million page views a month. (Why “xkcd”? “It’s just a word with no phonetic pronunciation,” his Web site, xkcd.com, answers.)
Mr. Munroe has become something of a cult hero. He counts himself as among the fewer than two dozen creators of comic strips on the Web who make a living at it.
At Google headquarters, a required stop on the geek-cult-hero speaking tour, he recently addressed hundreds of engineers, some of whom dutifully waited for him to sign their laptops. He said he had only wanted a tour of the place but had instead been invited to speak. The real thrill, he said, was that a hero of his, Donald Knuth, a professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford and a programming pioneer, was in the front row.
“It’s comparable to Bill Gates’s being in the front row,” he said. “I got to have lunch with him. He’s in his 70s, but people he is in touch with must have told him about it.”
While the comics play on the peculiarities of code, they are as much about escaping the clear, orderly world of commands to engage a chaotic sphere known as real life, or perhaps merely adulthood.
So one comic has a graph showing “my overall health” entering a steep decline “the day I realized I could cook bacon whenever I wanted.” Or, in one of Mr. Munroe’s favorites, a stick-figure couple revel in an apartment filled to the brim with playpen balls, “because we are grownups now, and it’s our turn to decide what that means.”
And, in a rare lapse from his plain-and-simple drawing style, a pair of stick figures walk in an increasingly beautiful landscape after first declaring: “I feel like I’m wasting my life on the Internet. Let’s walk around the world.” At the foot of a gorgeous mountain, however, one turns to the other and says, “And yet, all I can think is that this will make for a great LiveJournal entry.”
Mr. Munroe is clearly still getting used to his celebrity and to running a business. He and his roommate, Derek Radtke, work on the Web site out of their Somerville, Mass., apartment, and they recently hired an employee to handle e-mail.
“People are generally surprised that we make a living from it,” Mr. Munroe said. Without being specific, he said that the sales of xkcd merchandise support the two of them “reasonably well.” He said they sell thousands of T-shirts a month, either of panels from his strip or in their style, as well as posters.
“We’ve been getting a lot more efficient,” he said. “We were losing money on every T-shirt sold overseas for a while.” (But you can make it up in volume, I helpfully suggested. He moved on.)
A fan of newspaper comic strips since childhood, Mr. Munroe can simultaneously call himself an heir to “Peanuts” while recognizing that his quirky and technical humor would never have made it in newspapers.
On the Internet, he said, “You can draw something that appeals to 1 percent of the audience — 1 percent of United States, that is three million people, that is more readers than small cartoons can have.”
In that way, and many others, the Web has been a salvation. “People doing comics on the Internet are free of all the baggage that goes with being with a syndicate,” he said, “the editorial control, the space limits, the no control over what can be done with your cartoon.”
The Internet has also created a bond between Mr. Munroe and his readers that is exceptional. They re-enact in real life the odd ideas he puts forward in his strip. A case in point was the strip called “Dream Girl.” It recounted a dream in which a girl (stick figure with flowing hair) recites a bunch of numbers into the narrator’s ear.
“The xkcd person is the kind of person who would take that and run with it,” he said. The numbers were coordinates and a date months in the future.
The strip’s narrator says he went there and no one came. “It turns out that wanting something doesn’t make it real,” the strip concludes.
But on that day in real life, hundreds of fans met in a park in Cambridge.
And then they all ordered sandwiches.
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