Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic is a single-panel joke about the intersection of "yo mama" insults and academic vocabulary. A man angrily delivers what he intends as a cutting insult: "Yo mama'''s so unlettered, she mista

This comic imagines Isaac Newton visiting a patent office to patent infinitesimal calculus for use in solving physics problems. The clerk greets him with "Oh, hi Mister Newton," and Newton explains hi

This comic shows an elderly man ("Grampa") arguing with a younger woman about the practical utility of the Bible. He declares: "Oh yeah? Well I coated my front door in lamb'''s blood, and I haven'''t

This comic plays on the concept of Zeno's paradox, a famous philosophical puzzle from ancient Greece. A man asks a woman if she is familiar with Zeno's paradox, and she says no. She then explains that

This comic presents a series of escalating complaints about a "bad roommate" who happens to be an overly enthusiastic physics nerd. The roommate's offenses include: always droning on about physics and

This comic imagines a future where a highly advanced "pleasure-bot" -- a robot designed for sexual companionship -- is rejected by a human woman, not for being inadequate, but for being *too perfect*.

This comic depicts a man giving a baby a detailed, step-by-step guide to becoming an autocrat. He explains how to seize the treasury to control the military, identify the most influential people, brib

## The Joke A superhero called "Rational Man" fights crime using logic and evidence-based reasoning. Unfortunately, his methods — while technically correct — are completely ineffective because crimin

This comic opens with a poetic, existential meditation on hair: the eyes may be the window to the soul, but hair -- the "most dead" part of you -- will linger long after death. It won't notice your he

This comic charts the escalating complexity of a person's "sex plan" as a function of how long it has been since their last sexual encounter. Ten minutes after: the plan is a simple two-step flowchart

In this comic, a doctor delivers alternating rounds of "bad news" and "good news" to a patient about their impending death. Bad news: you're going to die. Good news: the will to live is just evolution

An alien arrives on Earth in a flying saucer and delivers a menacing ultimatum: "Our planet is running out of shallow platitudes. If we run out, we will die. And if we die, we will take you with us."

This single-panel comic is presented as a "Life Tip: Parenthood is the wrong way to work out neuroses." A father is playing the classic children's toe-counting game "This Little Piggy" with a baby, bu

In this comic, a man tells his partner that he feels inadequate when she uses a dildo. She reassures him it "isn't the same," but he takes the conversation in an unexpected direction: the dildo is mad

This comic is built around the word "prefenestrated." An English major tells someone, "Sir, at this moment, you should consider yourself prefenestrated!" The caption below reads: "It took about ten mi

This comic is formatted as a series of newspaper headlines and articles tracing the rise and fall of a man who claims to have discovered evidence of ghosts. First: "Man Presents First Evidence of Ghos

In this comic, a man asks "Do I need to wear a condom?" and a woman with glasses replies, "Need to? No." The caption below reads: "90% of pregnancies among computer scientists begin with literal phras

This comic reimagines the Garden of Eden by taking the "Tree of Knowledge" concept literally through the lens of computer science. God is giving Adam and Eve a tour of Eden, and when one of them asks

This comic, titled "How to Tell the Difference," presents a deliberately absurd question -- "What do you think is the dollar value of a leaky sack of monkey foetuses in the Bering Strait circa 1979?"

This comic is titled "Funtime Activity: Leaving Sad Product Reviews" and presents three fictional product reviews that are ostensibly about consumer goods but actually reveal deep personal sadness and

This comic features an alien trying to buy naked celebrity photos from a human. The alien keeps rejecting each photo because none of them are at the right zoom level. Too far away and he cannot resolv

This is a single-panel comic with a caption underneath. A bearded man sitting at a cafe tells someone across the table: "I'm making a you substitution." The caption below reads: "It's hard getting dum

In this comic, a red-haired woman marvels at the idea that every person is part of an unbroken chain of reproduction going back to the dawn of life. A bespectacled woman (the scientist character) imme

This comic plays on the classic genie-in-a-lamp scenario where the genie tells the man he may wish for anything except more wishes. The man, who appears to be a lawyer or otherwise legally minded, fin

This single-panel comic is titled "Parenting Tip: Existential Dread is Nature's All-Purpose Punishment." It shows a father and son sitting at a dinner table with a plate of broccoli. The child says "I

This four-panel comic explores the etymology of the word "vanilla" as it is used in the phrase "vanilla sex" (meaning conventional or plain sex). A man asks why "vanilla" is the term for regular sex,

This comic shows a father being asked by his wife "How'd the sex talk go?" He responds "Hilariously" while reading something on a tablet and grinning. The wife, walking away with an annoyed expression

This long-form comic reimagines the classic arcade game Pac-Man as a Lovecraftian horror story. It begins with one character dismissing old video games as boring, with no story or ambiance. Another ch

This comic takes aim at a common pet peeve among math and science professors: students who submit graphs without labeling their axes. In the first panel, a person with curly brown hair says "Oh, that'

This comic imagines a video game based on Jesus'''s miracle of multiplying fish, taken to an absurd extreme. A man shows a priest a "religious video game" where Jesus fights through the ancient world,

This comic plays on the stereotypical guilt trips that parents use to get their children to clean their rooms. In the first panel, a woman screams at a man "AAAH! You'''re not breathing! How are you a

This comic draws a pointed analogy between dismissing marriage equality as "just symbolic" and the historical injustice of racial segregation on buses. In the first panel, two men sit together on a bu

This comic starts with an innocent question from a child: "Daddy, why are they called clownfish? Are they like clowns?" The father, visibly excited, launches into a detailed biology lesson about how c

This comic is titled "Dad-Trolling: A Best Practices Guide" and presents a step-by-step manual for how fathers can mess with their children through deliberate misinformation. It begins with Step 1: "R

This comic is a cynical take on the modern college experience, presented as a college orientation speech. A woman addresses incoming students: "Hey kids! Welcome to college orientation! I want to make

This comic features a red-haired man approaching a woman and asking "Hey, you wanna play rock-paper-scissors-penis?" The woman immediately responds "Go to hell." In the second panel, the man tries to

This single-panel comic with a caption shows a courtroom scene. A defense lawyer passionately argues: "My client cannot possibly be guilty of baby murder! '''Justice''' is a fallacious Platonic ideal

This comic explores why undead children are such an effective horror trope. A family -- a man, a woman, and their young daughter Susie -- are watching a scary movie on TV that features a ghostly child

This comic is a math-based observation about the cumulative time savings of self-flushing toilets. It defines three variables: T (time saved per use of a self-flushing toilet, estimated at 0.5 seconds

This single-panel comic shows a man talking to a woman (who appears to be breaking up with him) at a table. The man responds to the breakup with overly literary language: "So you'''re dumping me for m

This comic personifies a woman'''s uterus as an antagonistic character in a conflict about pregnancy. In the first panels, a woman is going about her day when someone asks, "Say, are you pregnant?" Be

This is an unusually long and earnest SMBC comic that takes an inspirational tone. A skull (representing Death) addresses the reader with a series of observations about life and mortality. It begins:

This comic satirizes the dark logic of healthcare cost reduction. In the first panel, two government officials discuss ballooning healthcare costs. One suggests banning smoking to save money. An advis

This comic presents a series of discipline-specific euphemisms for saying "I'''m not dating anyone," organized into three categories: the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. Each profes

This comic features a student challenging a professor about the myth of Sisyphus. The student asks: "Wait, Professor... if Sisyphus had to roll the boulder up the hill over and over forever, why didn'

This comic imagines a geopolitical scenario where India sues the United States for half of its data. An aide rushes in to tell the President: "Mister President! India is suing for half of our data!" T

This single-panel comic, captioned "If sex were like standardization tests," shows two people in an intimate setting. One asks, "Wait! How do I know you'''re good at sex?" The other responds, "I got a

This comic features a debate between a man and his personified penis about which body part is truly "irrational." The man begins by saying, "God, I wish I didn'''t have a penis to make me do stupid th

This comic plays on the common medical trope of a doctor delivering a frightening diagnosis. A doctor tells her patient, "I'''m afraid you have Dickfallsoff virus," to which the alarmed patient respon

This comic satirizes human relationships by reframing them using the visual language of particle physics Feynman diagrams. A professor lectures to a class, explaining that "male and female particles i