1018: "Good Cop, Dadaist Cop"

[glasnt]

Title text: "NOW INVENT AN IMPOSSIBLE-TO-TRANSLATE LANGUAGE AND USE IT TO TELL US WHERE THE MONEY IS."


Hi joee.

[rhomboidal]

For really grueling interrogations, they bring in Abstract-Expressionist Post-Constructivist Neo-Plasticist Cop.

[ahammel]

Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: There are no rhinoceroses in purgatory.

[mconor]

Dadaism is like turn-of-the-century Adult Swim.

[Eternal Density]

¡Your cupcake is grating them!

[jalohones]

The Dadaist criminal would reply that the money was not theft but a found object, used to express his contempt for society. Stashing the money away - hiding it from public display - reveals his dismissal of the normal process of art.

[Eutychus]

This is the first one that's made me actually laugh out loud in quite a while.

Question: is the dadaist cop a slightly disguised Black Hat Guy?

[n079614]

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?

A: FISH!

[gormster]

I didn't even need the comic, I was giggling at the title.

[Arariel]

This is the first one that's made me actually laugh out loud in quite a while.

Question: is the dadaist cop a slightly disguised Black Hat Guy?

Not unless BHG suddenly grew a ponytail.

[907Code-G]

Yeah, hair is kind of the defining thing for genders in Randall's stuff.

Also, not gonna lie, I definitely googled dadaist as soon as I saw the title in my Safari Top Sites preview.

[FITorion]

Do you find that there is a spike in the number of times a word in one of your comics is googled when your comics come out?

I had to google Dadaist... I wonder if the spike in googles of that could measure in some way the popularity of XKCD...

...

and the lack of knowledge of Dadaism the general public has...

[Pfhorrest]

Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: There are no rhinoceroses in purgatory.

The version I've always heard is:

Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Three: two to hold the giraffe and one to fill the bathtub with small machine parts.

[Djehutynakht]

....This is just crazy enough to work.

[Duke Sigmund Igthorn]

I find it ironic. Wikipedia says "In addition to being anti-war, dada was also anti-bourgeois and anarchist in nature." I always find it hard to reconcile anti-war and anarchisim.

[Kleptonis]

DEBATE: Is an impossible-to-translate language even possible?

It seems to me could make a bunch of nonsense noises, but either those noises don't correspond to anything (and fails to tells where the money is/fails to be anything we could properly call a language) or those noises correspond to some concept or another that then has its own corresponding word or phrase in English and can be translated through context. I'm no linguist, so I'm open to alternatives.

(Of course that is exactly the sort of task a Dadaist would demand, but let's not let humor get in the way of pedantry.)

[LoopyChew]

Now I'm thinking of an old MadTV sketch that stuck in my mind where a gangster has seen every possible X cop/Y cop variation as two cops try it on him. The one that always sticks out in my mind is "polka cop, disco cop."

[SpeakerToManagers]

Oh, this explains why the urinal is missing from the jail men's room: the dadaist cop took it to the armory for a show.

[helo darqness]

[907Code-G]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense#Origin

[GulliNL]

Do you find that there is a spike in the number of times a word in one of your comics is googled when your comics come out?

I had to google Dadaist... I wonder if the spike in googles of that could measure in some way the popularity of XKCD...

...

and the lack of knowledge of Dadaism the general public has...

If my memory serves me well I believe there is a site somewhere that uses Google Trends to look for exactly these spikes If only my memory would serve me better so I could remember the name of this site...

Also I find this funny merely because the house we're building is on Laan van Dada (Dutch translation for Dada Lane).

[xarob]

Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: There are no rhinoceroses in purgatory.

The version I've always heard is:

Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Three: two to hold the giraffe and one to fill the bathtub with small machine parts.

Nope, I prefer:

A: Five: Two to hold the giraffe and one to fill the bathtub with brightly coloured machine tools.

[GulliNL]

Do you find that there is a spike in the number of times a word in one of your comics is googled when your comics come out?

I had to google Dadaist... I wonder if the spike in googles of that could measure in some way the popularity of XKCD...

...

and the lack of knowledge of Dadaism the general public has...

If my memory serves me well I believe there is a site somewhere that uses Google Trends to look for exactly these spikes If only my memory would serve me better so I could remember the name of this site...

Also I find this funny merely because the house we're building is on Laan van Dada (Dutch translation for Dada Lane).

My memory didn't serve me quite well, but Google did, so; http://commacommacrash.com/2009/12/what ... ffect.html

[jefph]

Excellent

I would recommend viewing a sketch from an early 80s British show 'Absolutely' called 'Nice and Nasty'

Official: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/absolutely/4od#2922605 about half way through, just before and just after the commercial break
Not available in UK, so couldn't check it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpEZDJ5OG9E
As a download: http://www.absolutelyandy.com/absolutely/videoclips/ Third clip from bottom

[gormster]

I find it ironic. Wikipedia says "In addition to being anti-war, dada was also anti-bourgeois and anarchist in nature." I always find it hard to reconcile anti-war and anarchisim.

Every anarchist I know is anti-war. You do not understand anarchism.

[SirMustapha]

I have no idea what the humour should be in this comic. The only thing that occurs to me is "Randall just read about Dada on Wikipedia and decided to use it in a comic", and this thing came out.

The Dadaist criminal would reply that the money was not theft but a found object, used to express his contempt for society. Stashing the money away - hiding it from public display - reveals his dismissal of the normal process of art.

Now that was an actual joke.

EDIT: What scares me is to imagine how many stupid wannabe geeks will start referring to this comic every single time Dada is mentioned; because, as we all know, for some people, merely reading xkcd is not enough: you have to boast it everywhere, constantly.

[alun009]

merely reading xkcd is not enough: you have to boast it everywhere, constantly.

I'm thinking of Star Wars all of a sudden.

[jefph]

merely reading xkcd is not enough: you have to boast it everywhere, constantly.

sudo boast it everywhere, constantly.

[Game_boy]

merely reading xkcd is not enough: you have to boast it everywhere, constantly.

The ones I see everywhere constantly are the "purity of fields" and that one relationships comic, which out of context misrepresent it badly.

[snowyowl]

This is a 727x257 PNG image. Can you deduce the existence of capital gains tax from it? Can you reconstitute Rice Krispies into rice pudding? Now redefine waste heat as information you don't need and vice-versa. Under these conditions, more than half of all weddings end in divorce. What good is a set of paints to a blind man? Delicious. A teardrop is lost in the ocean, but not in a river. The pieces can be worth more than the whole, especially if you take the Axiom of Choice. You can eat gold, but nothing happens. You can't make a chicken without foregoing a few omelets. . Data compression as a metaphor for war. Two bracelets don't make a necklace. Sunburn is not an anagram of suburb. I wish to make a universe from scratch. Given none, none. Given one, one. Given two, infinity. Coal is a lie. A detective's office is made of the same atoms as a coffee stain. Drop the floor. Given four, space. How long is a piece of str_ng? It doesn't matter, supply must be less than demand. A tax that hurts nobody is the inside of an empty safe. Discus.

[cemper93]

I find it ironic. Wikipedia says "In addition to being anti-war, dada was also anti-bourgeois and anarchist in nature." I always find it hard to reconcile anti-war and anarchisim.

Even though that likely was a trolling attempt, I (being an anarchist) have to respond to this due to the huge misunderstanding of anarchist ideologies in the general public.

Anarchism is not, as many people tend to believe, about absolute opposition towards the mere existence of a state. This political stance exists - it is known as Political Nihilism, and if you've never heard about it, that is because almost nobody is of that opinion today. It was somewhat widespread among Russian intellectuals in the czardom, but its popularity has decreased since back then. Nowadays, there are two political movements that would identify themselves as "Anarchist".

The first one is the "classical" left-wing Anarchism, which wants to create an egalitarian society somewhat similar to a Communist society, but without going through the repressive state of socialism. Instead, left-wing anarchists (or libertarian socialists) want people to join non-hierarchical organizations (often referred to as "syndicates", but other names may be used) by their free will, to then manage property collaboratively. Law enforcement shall not be a matter of single individuals, but shall be done by the people, just as anything else. Anarchists reject all kind of power that individuals can impose over others, but they do not reject the occasional necessity of managing matters of public interest. This type of Anarchism is especially incompatible with the ideas of Capitalism and Nationalism. This stance has had its moments during the course of history, especially in Catalonia during and before the Spanish Civil War.

The second one is a newer movement, the proponents of which do often refer to themselves as "libertarians" or "anarcho-capitalists" as well, though their stance is entirely different and more comparable to Classical Liberalism. By left-wing anarchists or libertarian socialists, they are often referred to as "minarchists", and I will use that word in the following paragraph to avoid confusion. Minarchism's ultimate goal is, just like Anarchism's, as much freedom for the individual as possible. Unlike anarchists, who see a company with a boss who gives orders and workers who obey and unequal distribution of wealth in general as a kind of oppression, minarchists are of the opinion that individual freedom can best be achieved in a free market economy. They do therefore want to reduce state intervention as much as possible, leaving the state's only responsibilities law enforcement and the enforcement of contracts that were concluded by free individuals. Minarchism is incompatible with the ideas of Nationalism and each Socialism (because it's too repressive) and Communism (because they think it impossible or any redistribution of wealth an arbitrary intervention and therefore a form of oppression). This stance is widespread in the USA today, especially in the "Libertarian Party".

I tried to be as neutral as I could, but it may still be noticeable that I'm a libertarian socialist. Also, sorry for ranting.

[Kisama]

This is a 727x257 PNG image. Can you deduce the existence of capital gains tax from it? Can you reconstitute Rice Krispies into rice pudding? Now redefine waste heat as information you don't need and vice-versa. Under these conditions, more than half of all weddings end in divorce. What good is a set of paints to a blind man? Delicious. A teardrop is lost in the ocean, but not in a river. The pieces can be worth more than the whole, especially if you take the Axiom of Choice. You can eat gold, but nothing happens. You can't make a chicken without foregoing a few omelets. . Data compression as a metaphor for war. Two bracelets don't make a necklace. Sunburn is not an anagram of suburb. I wish to make a universe from scratch. Given none, none. Given one, one. Given two, infinity. Coal is a lie. A detective's office is made of the same atoms as a coffee stain. Drop the floor. Given four, space. How long is a piece of str_ng? It doesn't matter, supply must be less than demand. A tax that hurts nobody is the inside of an empty safe. Discus.

Clappity clappity

[ricree]

Dadaism is like turn-of-the-century Adult Swim.

Seeing as how it's run from 2001 to the present, isn't Adult Swim the turn-of-the-century Adult Swim?

[EpicanicusStrikes]

What scares me is to imagine how many stupid wannabe geeks will start referring to this comic every single time Dada is mentioned....

What scares me is the concept that Chewbacca only moved to Endor because he was into midgets.

[jonadab]

DEBATE: Is an impossible-to-translate language even possible?

She of course meant "impossible for us to translate". But if you mean "impossible for anyone to translate, including someone who knows the language", then no, it's not strictly possible -- although there are *pairs* of languages that can be vanishingly close to "impossible to translate between". English and Japanese, for example, while not fully theoretically impossible, can be a fairly nasty combination in practice: even people who are fully bilingual in the two languages cannot in general easily translate arbitrary material from one language to the other, especially if you're looking for a traditional sentence-by-sentence translation. (The main problem stems from huge differences is what information every sentence is expected to contain and what information is routinely left unstated and carried by the larger context. Just for example, it's possible to have an entire paragraph of Japanese without once specifying a subject for any of the verbs. There isn't even a standard grammatical mechanism for specifying the subject; it's handled differently for different verbs, and for some verbs there isn't even a provision for indicating such a thing. The Japanese textbooks used in the English-speaking world usually claim that が marks the subject, but its actual meaning is closer to "the one that", and it is just as frequently used for what we would call the object as for the subject, and sometimes it is used to mark a noun that has no direct grammatical relationship to the verb. The whole concept of "subject", in the Indo-European sense, just doesn't exist in Japanese.)

[radtea]

I find it ironic. Wikipedia says "In addition to being anti-war, dada was also anti-bourgeois and anarchist in nature." I always find it hard to reconcile anti-war and anarchisim.

Utopian anarchists, who find it deeply mysterious why human males are about 20% larger than human females, think that the institution of the State rather than a human tendency toward completely irrational violent behaviour driven by mate competition is the sole cause of war. They also find it deeply mysterious why the genetic record suggests that amongst ancient humans the breeding population of males was only about half the total population.

The thing I find hilariously funny about Dada is how utterly tame it is compared to human reality as revealed by the Internet. All these pretentious artistic pricks were smugly congratulating themselves on how transgressive their work was and it doesn't come within a tithe of the the sort of thing you can find on the 'Net being done by otherwise apparently ordinary people. Dadaism failed as an artistic anti-movement in pretty much every respect.

[eran_rathan]

Dadaism is like turn-of-the-century Adult Swim.

Seeing as how it's run from 2001 to the present, isn't Adult Swim the turn-of-the-century Adult Swim?

I'd say that Dadaism was more like 4chan.

[Plutarch]

Good Comic! I always enjoy a dadaist reference. It does remind me of an episode of 3rd Rock from the Sun, I think Dick took part in a police interrogation, and suggested using 'Sad cop, slightly effeminate cop.'

[SerMufasa]

I liked the comic, but I felt the "What's Wrong with Art?" response in the last panel was too simplistic. The artist should have more faith in its readers and not need to put in such an obvious clue as to what dadaism entailed.

The thing I find hilariously funny about Dada is how utterly tame it is compared to human reality as revealed by the Internet. All these pretentious artistic pricks were smugly congratulating themselves on how transgressive their work was and it doesn't come within a tithe of the the sort of thing you can find on the 'Net being done by otherwise apparently ordinary people. Dadaism failed as an artistic anti-movement in pretty much every respect.

I wouldn't say it failed, but I do agree about the pretentiousness. 19th/early 20th century European Intellectuals as a group (obviously there are individual exceptions) had to have been the smuggest bunch of assholes in history. We still have morons teaching that Columbus proved the Earth was round because of them.

[philsov]

Is there a difference between Church Latin and normal Latin?