xkcd.WTF!?

Explanation ➲

This comic, as the heading indicates, arbitrarily selects emoji and uses them to make up very bizarre sports. Although some of these might be completely normal, most of them take things to a completely absurd level.

The title text is a reference to the Triple Crown, which is an highly prestigious award given to a three-year-old thoroughbred horse who wins the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes, the first three of the four listed events. The joke is that if Horse Hole was a real sport, then one who won a major competition for it, the Missouri Horse Hole, in addition to the three main horse racing events, would win a "Quadruple Crown".

Please note that some emoji may not be supported by your browser, in which the emoji will appear as a black rectangle, and if there is a male/female version of the emoji, a male/female sign will appear next to the rectangle.

Emoji	Sport	Description
🤽‍♂️🌋	Lavaball	Sets the sport of water polo around or inside an active volcano. If the water is simply replaced with lava, the players would asphyxiate from the toxic fumes long before they burned to death in the molten rock. If a typical pool of water is involved, the introduction of lava would cause rapid evaporation and the release of chlorine gas, which is destructive to living tissue. In any case, this game is not a good idea.[citation needed]
🤾‍♀️🤺	Bladeball	Using a fencing foil to hit a ball would be rather inefficient. There is however an actual sport combining ball sport and fencing called Jugger.
💃💃⚽	Fancyball	Soccer played in high heels and dresses would be a problem for both kicking and running, with the grassy terrain exacerbating these issues, and these would lead to frequent injury.[citation needed] The name is likely a pun on "fancy ball", a dance party where people are in fancy clothing.[citation needed]
🕳️🏇🏇🏇	Horse hole	Jockeys ride their horses into a large pit. Needless to say, such a sport would constitute blatant animal abuse; the ensuing fall would seriously injure competing equines (as well as their jockeys if they don't bail out beforehand). If the horse's self-preservation instinct kicks in before reaching the edge, the jockey will likely be severely injured in the process, an outcome which would likely garner a lot less pity. Both this segment and the title text may relate to Episode 354 of My Brother My Brother And Me, "Beanfreak", where a potential punishment for losing horses in a race is described as a trapdoor leading to a "pony pile" beneath the track. (Many of the podcast's episodes deal with horse racing and horse behavior, including some impassioned conversations on the performance of specific horses and the unregulated nature of the widely recognized Triple Crown achievement.)
🔪🏀⛏️	Basketball shredding	The apparent point of this sport is to compete to destroy basketballs as quickly and/or as thoroughly as possible. There is some transgressive appeal in mistreating sports equipment, but hardly enough to keep a captive audience.
🥚🔭🕵️‍♀️	Eggspotting	This could be a combination of egg hunting and birdwatching. The emojis may imply that said eggs would have to be found alone in nature, as if they were wild animals, though it might be spotting of eggs of the wild animals in their nests. If the latter is true, the humor arises from the situation being like a form of pre-emptive birdwatching, as the eggs will eventually hatch into birds, and such an activity might be considered easier, or "beginner-level", birdwatching, due to the eggs remaining in one place.
⛷️🐊	Alligator jumping	An unusual combination of attributes, and to get the alligators to adapt to a cold environment might be a challenge. It may be related to the similar sport of shark jumping.
👩🎣🧜‍♂️	Merfishing	Unless humans volunteer to get in costume, this sport is unlikely to have any successes, due to the nonexistence of mermaids.[citation needed]
👨🏸🧚🏸👩	Tinkerball	Playing badminton with a fairy, named after Tinker Bell as a pun. Likely to injure the fairy, and such an activity runs the risk of the fairy flying away to escape the abuse. Fairies are not known to exist in the real world.[citation needed]
🥌🦔🥌	Hedgehog curling	Hedgehogs are not ideal projectiles for sports,[citation needed] as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has already demonstrated, and such an idea would be considered animal abuse on top of the impracticality. Nonetheless, hedgehogs are technically skilled at curling...their bodies.
🗜️🍔	Burger clamping	Perhaps a challenge to fit a tall burger into a bite-sized height, though said clamp would probably be more likely to pierce the burger than to flatten it.
👩‍🚀🏹🛰️	Consequence archery	Archery on a space station could cause damage to its structure leading to the potentially explosive decompression of the space station, and necessitate the evacuation of the astronauts aboard. If played outside, stray arrows could still cause a disaster by setting space debris into motion or by hitting space vessels or equipment. Another dangerous consequence of shooting an arrow while floating in space without a jetpack would be that the shot propels the astronaut in the opposite direction of the arrow, setting them off to drift away helplessly into space. Alternatively, the goal may be to hit satellites which would imply the consequence part being the resulting legal action accompanying a high score unless you wait for them to deorbit naturally in which case the consequence part would be everything associated with being near large chunks of metal at terminal velocity. Another possible hazard would come if the sport involves trying to hit an orbiting object from the ground in which case building let alone trying to wield a bow capable of launching an arrow out of the atmosphere would be dangerous,[citation needed] illegal[citation needed] and difficult. More casual versions could arise from playing on celestial bodies with less gravity and atmosphere but that would defeat the whole point. Shooting an arrow aboard the ISS was considered in the what if? book.
🦉➡️📬	Owlstuffing	This appears to consist of attempting to stuff owls into mailboxes, which would be doubly illegal, because it would be cruel to the owls and interfere with the delivery of the mail. The mailbox is shown with the flag up, likely meaning that the point is to use these owls to attack mailmen, or that the point is to retrieve the owls from one mailbox and place them in another. Possibly a reference to owls carrying mail in the Harry Potter series.
🍴🕯️🍴	Candle eating	An even more unhealthy form of competitive eating. Eating large amounts of candle wax can cause intestinal obstruction.
⛳💣🏌️‍♀️	Consequence golf	The "consequence" of this game is simple: the bomb's eventual explosion necessitates efficient playing. Golfing with a bomb would likely significantly reduce the par on each hole, depending on the length of the fuse, and due to the threat of explosion, it would probably not be possible to exceed par unless the golfer is also very fast. There would certainly be damage to the course and golfers unless the holes extinguished the bombs of golfers who succeeded in time. The balance and rolling of the bomb balls would also be impeded by the fuses and caps. The bombs would also need to be very small to be used with standard golf clubs.
👉🐍👈	Snake shaming	Goal appears to be to humiliate a snake, although this may be impossible for most snakes due to their inability to understand humans.[citation needed] Probably a play on snake charming. Also a possible reference to the biblical story where the snake is shamed for deceiving mankind by being doomed to crawl on its belly.
🔥🧗‍♀️🔥	Hell escape	Trying to escape the lake of fire is the pastime of damned souls, but perhaps living people are instead sent there and have to return home.
🎮🥑🎮	Multiplayer avocado	Unless a game based on avocados is the subject, there is, to say the least, a hardware compatibility issue here. Very different from the adult version, multiplayer eggplant (🎮🍆🎮; see 1870: Emoji Movie Reviews).