There is no such thing as too much recursion.

xkcdexplainedexplained:

xkcdexplained:

A man wakes up confused in a room with a laptop. Following a loud, wind-like sound the man loses the ability to speak which causes him to panic even further. We then see him run in-place and fall over. The camera then pans out, revealing two characters on the outside of a chamber that is holding the panicking man. It is then revealed that the man inside the chamber is a physics professor, and the two other characters had put him in a frictionless vacuum to see how he would work.

The joke here is that physics professors very commonly use a “frictionless vacuum” as the environment for problems and experiments given to their students. This is done to greatly simplify the work needed to solve the problem, as one can ignore the forces of friction and air resistance.

It’s also funny that they murdered a person.

The author of this explanation presumably shares some of XKCD guy’s enmity toward physics professors and/or their affection for frictionless vacuums. As such, he is able to recognize that this particular edition of XKCD is unusually funny.

This is entirely correct. Well, apart from the “unusually funny” bit, as I found this one to fall flat. This author believes that this joke is only a small percentage as funny as it would have been had it assumed a perfectly spherical physicist in a frictionless vacuum.

Also, Vacuum is a funny word to type too often.

And that I’m abandoning the passive voice forthwidth, because I’m unable to pull it off without sounding like a dick.