Round 3 Transcript for Rebecca Watson

REBECCA WATSON (RW): A quarter million readers log on everyday to xkcd.com where Randall Munroe publishes his webcomic dealing with romance, sarcasm, math, and language. After a year of working on robots at NASA's Langley Research Center, Randall quit to become one of just a select few artists able to make a living through his webcomic. Randall, thanks for being here.

RANDALL MUNROE (RM): Thanks for having me.

RW: You had one comic about a girl who fills her house with the plastic balls, uh plastic playpen balls...

RM: ...that is possibly the most popular thing I've ever written.

RW: ...yeah, well the first time I read it I thought, "Oh my god, that was always my dream as a kid, to do that!"

RM: Yeah, you thought about paying the kids to go in, you'd be like, you'd tell five-year olds "I'll give you a penny for each of the playpen balls you bring me... "

RW: Yeah, yeah...

RM: I worked it out and you can't even, at a reasonable rate like one shiny penny per playpen ball, you still can't fill a room for anything reasonable.

RW: Really?

RM: Yeah.

RW: How much to fill a room?

RM: Um, it uh, a friend of mine, she put together a calculator to do it online given the dimensions of your room and you find the prices you can, but even for a pretty small room it comes out to thousands of dollars.

RW: Thousands of dollars, really?

RM: Yeah, you can get hundreds of them, you can get like a hundred playpen balls for ten bucks, but it turns out you pack a lot of spheres into a space like that, like it'll be tens of thousands of balls to fill up a room like this.

RW: Right... do you, do you ever wonder, uh, if you're going to, like if a particular cartoon you're drawing is going to out-nerd your audience? Sometimes they go so far, you know, into computer programming or weird mathematics. Does that ever concern you?

RM: It's actually interesting, what I get now and then is emails saying, "Hey, I want you to go further into this area, or you know into this..." I get a lot of requests for biology cartoons and I don't know a lot about biology, and so the thing is I just, I'll take whatever I'm working on and do a comic about that, and it'll be something in math or physics or computer science, and people sort of assume that I'm an expert in all of these areas. It's like, you know, it's not just like a level of nerdiness, people are nerdy in different ways. So you know, I'll do something about computer science that'll go over someone's head and then I'll do something about math that that same person will get, and so um...

RW: Yeah, I've noticed that, um, you also tend to temper the nerdiness sometimes, like there's one comic you did that says "You are like the prime numbers and I'm like the Riemen Zeta function deeply tied with you... although, strictly speaking the Riemen Zeta function couldn't have given you herpes." Now, I have no idea what the Riemen Zeta function is but I laughed.

RM: Yeah, a lot of people, you know, will say, they'll introduce the comic to someone else, and say, "If you don't know math you won't get a lot of these," but if you count, there are a lot of comics that sort of mention math things but the ones where the punchline actually depends on it are few and far between so it's more like it's a backdrop you know if you're used to thinking about math or numbers, you're in the right mindset for it but the actual jokes will be you know just jokes.

RW: Right. Now, speaking of the plastic playpen balls, you recently gave a talk at MIT and you sold out 350 tickets, first of all...

RM: ...450 actually.

RW: 450, I'm sorry, and there was still a line out the door, and, uh, I heard that they pelted you with playpen balls.

RM: Yes, uh, some unknown group of students set up, rigged the ceiling to, uh, the tiles opened up and detached a shower of playpen balls down on the audience and then they all threw those at me.

RW: Nice! Now, that's not completely out of the ordinary, it seems like more... it seems like at least once a week there's some comic you do that your fans kind of take out of the world of comics and into reality.

RM: Yeah, I think it started when I did a comic about this sort of wacky blogging figure named Cory Doctorow and I wrote about how he wears a red cape and goggles and does his blogs from a balloon, and he got an award a week later for something and they presented him with a red cape and goggles.

RW: That's hysterical!

RM: And soon after I had also done one about Richard Stallman, who's a free software pioneer and also sort of a strange guy and I did a comic implying that he sleeps armed with a katana, and some fans got together and mailed him a katana.

RW: Which probably freaked him out pretty good...

RM: He did not, he had never heard of the comic, he doesn't go online a lot, so he was baffled but he liked it. After I saw that I sort of said okay this is getting out of hand, so then in response to that I drew a comic about Janeane Garofalo jumping a motorcycle over a crashing space station over a volcano where there are tyrannasaurs. And I said, that can be a challenge for the fans to put together and then once they figure out a way to make that happen... then I'll, you know, but in the meantime...

RW: Has Janeane Garofalo called you yet?

RM: Not... I wait by the phone everyday, but no.

RW: Here's the thing, I don't think I've ever heard of anybody feedin g their cat a plate of lasagna, taping it, and sending it to Jim Davis. What is it about webcomics that kind of... is it about webcomics, is it about your comic in particular? What's inspiring this great love?

RM: I think one big part of it is that the atmosphere of the comic, there's sort of um, a whimsy to it ,that a lot of people seem to latch onto, like the idea that you can be an intellectual nihilist-- everything is meaningless, but okay let's go climb a tree. So it gets a playful attitude. And then I think another big part of it is that element of people feeling like, "I'm the only one who ever thought of that... " and that makes them really connect to it, and want to act it out, or see the joke in real life.

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