Noam Cohen, Staff Writer, New York Times

This Is Funny Only if You Know Unix

May 27, 2008 at 12:01 am PT

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.

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Tagged with: Internet, Noam Cohen, online, Randall Munroe, The New York Times, Unix, Xkcd

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