The 10 Funniest People, Videos and Things of the Coming Year

Randall Munroe's stick-figure web comic XKCD's been around since 2005, but — in the parlance of the technies who've been faithfully following it since the beginning — it's only recently penetrated the consciousness of the so-called "normals." That may be because Munroe's droll, hilarious strips, which he posts three times a week, are speaking ever more directly to a generation raised on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and countless other objects in the techno-zeitgeist. (There's also a book with selections from Munroe's first 600 comics, XKCD Volume 0, published by reddit founder Alexis Ohanian.) Take one of Munroe's latest strips, "Wikileaks," which mocks Julian Assange and his shadowy "Anonymous" army; or another that pokes fun at this generation's obsession with charts and graphs: a boy tells a girl he thinks they should give their relationship another shot, and she responds: "We should break up, and I can prove it"— and whips out a graph. "I knew data would convince you," she says, when he seems to be swayed by her evidence. "No, I just think I can do better than someone who doesn't label her axes."

—D.S.