Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic presents a dystopian satire about quantifying happiness and the good life. It opens with the premise "The Good Life Can Be Quantified," assigning point values to pleasant experiences: a tou

This comic contrasts how NASA announcements actually work versus how the public wishes they would work. In the first panel, labeled "How NASA Announcements Work," a woman at a podium announces, "We'''

This comic is a lengthy fairy tale parody that uses the structure of a bedtime story to satirize the intersection of mathematics, economics, and political optimization. The premise is that each year,

This comic presents a physics problem as a trick to get the reader to unknowingly perform a crude calculation. At the top, it displays the equations: 5ml(1e-3 kg/ml) * 12.5 m/s = P and P = 80 kg * v,

This comic plays on the double meaning of the number 1001 in the title "1001 Jokes." A man holding a book complains, "I want my money back! This book is 99%% blank pages!" The other person responds, "

This comic is titled "Get to Know Your Cutlery-Related Intimacy Metaphors" and presents three panels exploring utensil-based terms for cuddling positions. The first panel shows "Spooning" -- a well-kn

This comic presents what appears to be a simple questionnaire: "If you were at Arby'''s right now, how much would you spend?" with a blank line for the answer. Below it, the caption reads: "We managed

This comic tells a touching but ultimately cynical story about a mother giving her daughter a "worry box" at bedtime. The daughter initially suspects it'''s the traditional kind -- just an empty box w

This comic features a "Dictionary Genie" who grants a woman the power to invent one new word. The genie emerges from what appears to be a lamp or dictionary, announcing grandly: "I am the Dictionary G

This comic is titled "Funtime Activity: Euphemisms for Non-Taboo Subjects" and flips the concept of euphemisms on its head. Normally, euphemisms are used to discuss taboo or uncomfortable topics in po

This comic depicts the overthinking that can accompany a simple household problem. In the first panel, a man notices a spider on his windowsill and panics. In the second panel, he launches into an ext

This comic is drawn on graph paper and features anthropomorphized geometric shapes -- specifically triangles -- acting out a dramatic domestic scene. In the first panel, a larger triangle encourages a

This comic takes the theological concept of ensoulment -- the belief that a soul enters the body at the moment of conception -- and pushes it to absurd, logical extremes. Scientists discover how to re

This single-panel comic shows two people in conversation. A person with glasses responds to the other person by saying "Ahh, so basically suicide in slow motion." The other person, wearing a vest and

This comic features a human office worker named Stan who is introduced to Occagus, a green alien from the more advanced planet Zorglax. The alien explains that his world''s leaders heard about poor Ea

In the first panel, a math teacher (Mr. Johnson) is being confronted by an administrator who says "It''s not what it looks like! Every student in your 2pm math class sent me a photograph of you giving

This comic features a doctor telling a patient he only has a few days to live. The doctor then recommends "a new method of death" involving virtual reality goggles connected to a helicopter with a gun

This two-panel comic contrasts how the narrator feels about two very different categories of wrongdoing. The top panel, labeled "How I feel about serial killers," shows a woman calmly reading a book a

In the first panel, an angel appears and tells a woman "For your sins, you will die one year from today." The woman responds with excitement: "Wow, really?" In the next panels, the woman is shown happ

This single-panel comic (with a caption below) shows a physicist describing a house fire in the most technically accurate but completely unhelpful way possible. The physicist explains: "Well, a small

This comic shows an adult (wearing glasses, likely an economist or rationalist type) answering the door to a Girl Scout selling cookies. Instead of simply buying or declining, the adult proposes a mor

This long-form comic features a conversation between a man and God, who appears as a glowing golden orb. The man asks why God does not show himself anymore, and God explains he did not mean to show hi

This comic features a child asking his father an awkward question: "Dad, why do women call out during sex?" The father, sitting in a chair reading a book, confidently answers "Evolution." He then laun

This comic imagines a bizarre alternative to democracy called "Evodevomocracy." It opens with a political figure congratulating the winner of an election and consoling the loser, then noting a fundame

This comic explores a real mathematical concept in an accessible and humorous way. A red-haired girl explains to her friend that because distance is infinitely divisible, you can assign number pairs t

This comic presents a numbered list titled "Phases of Life" on a yellow note, listing 14 phases that each follow the pattern of a verb plus "everything": 1) Eat everything, 2) See everything, 3) Have

This comic presents a riff on the famous poem "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer, which begins with the well-known line "I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree." In the comic, the poem is rewri

This comic is titled "Advanced Sex Technique: The Consummate Lover" and presents a step-by-step guide to an absurd bedroom magic trick. Step 1: Go to the bathroom and secretly put on a condom. Step 2:

This comic jokes about the frustrating gap between introductory physics and more advanced physics courses. In the first panel, an older professor tells a student heading off to college, "Good luck in

This comic depicts a scene from ancient history where a group of proud barbarian warriors are confronting a Roman-style empire. Their leader gives a rousing Braveheart-style speech: "You promise us ci

This comic takes the religious claim that natural disasters are God's punishment for homosexuality and follows it to its logical -- and absurd -- conclusion. It opens with a politician telling the pre

This comic is titled "Cosmology Does Weird Things to Your Brain" and shows a single-panel scene where a woman tells someone "Well, today sucked." When asked "Why?", she responds: "I stepped in dog shi

This comic is titled "True Weinersmith Tales" and presents one of Zach Weinersmith's real-life ideas taken to a humorous extreme. The premise is that all political speeches could be improved by replac

This comic is a satire of American college football (and contact sports in general), using the absurd metaphor of a fictional sport called "headbrick," in which bricks are thrown at college students'

This single-panel comic depicts a scene where the president of the United States is being interviewed by a reporter. At the end of the interview, the president rattles off a string of vulgar words fol

This comic depicts a man at a bar using an unconventional pickup line: he openly announces that he has a tiny penis. A woman responds with skepticism, asking "That's your pickup line?" The man then ex

This comic features a nerdy pickup line delivered with computer science terminology. A man wearing glasses asks a woman (who is wearing a "Star Treks 1, 2 & 4" shirt, marking her as a fellow geek), "H

This comic presents a made-up food rule called "The Detroit Rule," which states that any food sounds tastier when prefaced by a location name. One woman explains the rule to another, who tests it out:

This comic is a tender bedtime scene between a mother and her young son Bobby that takes a sharp turn into existential territory. The mother begins with a classic parental reassurance: "Bobby, I want

This single-panel comic imagines the invention of bagpipes with a humorous origin story. Two Scottish-looking men with beards are discussing how to commemorate the death of their friend MacDonough. On

This wordless comic tells a story entirely through images, depicting two soldiers on opposite sides of a conflict -- identifiable by their different uniforms and helmets (one appears to be a British-s

## The Joke A person asks God about the meaning of life. God, visibly uncomfortable, eventually admits that there isn't one — He just kind of started the universe and it went from there. The person i

This comic is a Halloween-themed strip featuring a little girl who goes trick-or-treating dressed as a "quantum mechanic" -- wearing a lab coat and carrying a wrench. When a man at the door asks what

This comic depicts a conversation between a man and his own brain, exploring the evolutionary psychology behind social comparison and envy. The brain announces that it wants to remind the man about "t

This comic presents a darkly humorous scenario about love, grief, and trust. A man who is dying soon offers his partner a pill that will alter her brain chemistry so she will believe she never liked h

This comic satirizes 24-hour cable news culture and election coverage. Two TV news anchors are discussing a slight change in election polls. The female anchor gives a perfectly rational, statistically

This comic is a Venn diagram joke with three overlapping circles. The yellow circle is labeled "Attractive parts of a woman'''s body," the red circle is "Body parts that come in pairs," and the blue c

This comic satirizes education policy and the misuse of statistics. An advisor tells the President, "Good news, Mister President. We'''ve created a new breed of Homo sapiens who are so dumb they will

This comic is titled "SMBC Presents: Film Geek Goes to a Fortune Teller." A person visits a fortune teller with a crystal ball, who delivers an ominous prediction: "I foresee you becoming so obsessed

This comic plays on the mathematical concept of a Klein bottle to create a nerdy loophole joke about open container laws. A police officer has pulled over a driver and is presumably citing him for hav