Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic mocks the "adaptationist" school of evolutionary thinking by having a bespectacled woman deliver increasingly absurd claims about the adaptive purpose of male genitalia. She argues that the

This comic subverts the sentimental trope of a dying father expressing his final wishes. An elderly bald man with glasses, lying in what appears to be a hospital bed, tells his red-haired daughter: "W

This is an ambitious, multi-panel comic that imagines a society where "strife" in relationships is treated as a quantifiable, tradeable economic commodity. The comic opens with a graph showing that in

This lengthy comic is a philosophical meditation on political ideology and group cohesion. It opens with the observation that "if you have a self-consistent view, you'''re going to have problems." The

This comic humorously contrasts how cat owners perceive their pets versus how the cats themselves might experience the situation. A woman excitedly tells her friend "Let me show you my kitty!" while t

This comic takes on the classic philosophical question "If a tree falls and no one is present, does it make a sound?" A person with glasses is talking to a Buddhist monk and gives the straightforward

This comic features a distinguished-looking Victorian gentleman in a top hat and cravat with a gold chain hanging from his pocket. While a woman in a green dress is mid-conversation ("So, I told him I

This comic presents a satirical proposal displayed in a red banner at the top: "A PROPOSAL: People who favor '''alternative medicine''' shall receive alternative versions of everything." The scene bel

This comic explores the philosophical problem of personal identity through a conversation between a young girl and her father. The girl poses a thought experiment: what if she had surgery, woke up scr

## The Joke A character contemplates the vastness of the universe — billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars, most with planets, all of it stretching across incomprehensible distances

This comic presents "The Cosmological Rorschach Test," which poses the question: what is the first universe someone imagines after learning multiverse theory? The premise is that your initial response

This comic is a satirical parallel between creationism and a hypothetical "revolution denialism." A history professor begins lecturing about Louis XVI'''s execution when a student interrupts to say th

This comic imagines a "political science translation of the Bible," specifically the story of Passover and the tenth plague of Egypt. The Angel of Death appears at an Egyptian household, and the Egypt

This comic depicts a sex education class gone hilariously wrong. A teacher welcomes students to "day one of sex ed" and asks if everyone has a banana and condom. One student asks why his banana is sma

This comic presents a poetic meditation on love that builds to an unexpected punchline. It begins with the statement "My love for you is small" shown alongside a tiny heart in darkness. The narration

This comic imagines the biblical origin of butts. An angel reports to God (depicted as a large, round, yellow entity with triangular features) that "the humans are too prideful!" God responds with sur

This comic, titled "How Discovery Happens," satirizes the unpredictable and unglamorous nature of scientific breakthroughs. In the first panel, an eager young scientist with a pencil declares, "Okay!

This comic depicts an awkward "sex talk" between a mother and her young daughter. The mother nervously begins, "Okay, sweetie, it'''s uh... it'''s time we had the sex talk." Struggling to find an anal

This comic is a graph showing "Esteem for Humanity While Reading an Article on Positive Race Relations" plotted against "Depth in Article." The curve starts low at the headline, then gradually rises t

This comic takes the classic parent-child game of "got your nose" and escalates it to absurd, villainous extremes. An adult playfully pretends to steal a baby'''s nose, but instead of giving it back,

This comic features a character arguing that gravity is the "gay force," using a series of increasingly strained analogies to make the case. The character points out that gravity is a force of attract

This comic satirizes the common political trope of flattering parents by calling parenting "the hardest job in the world." A president is speaking at a "National Gathering of Parents" and begins by sa

This comic is titled "The College Paradox" and presents a graph with age on the x-axis and two plotted lines. The red line represents "confidence in received wisdom from a small number of books" and t

This comic explores the unsettling experience of closely examining your own hands. A character sitting outside tells a friend that sometimes they feel intellectually transcendent, like they have moved

This comic is a single-panel joke featuring a character who resembles Carl Sagan -- the famous astronomer and science communicator known for his sense of wonder and poetic descriptions of the cosmos -

This comic presents a darkly humorous take on modern parenting philosophy. A woman is told her son kicked a girl at school and she needs to tell him he is naughty. Instead, she quotes Oscar Wilde: "As

This comic plays on Jesus'''s famous teaching to "turn the other cheek" -- the instruction from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:39) that if someone strikes you on one cheek, you should turn and off

This comic features two aliens discussing plans to travel to Earth. The first alien enthusiastically declares they should go consume the humans, but the second, more rational alien systematically dism

## The Joke The comic compares what people think college is for versus what it actually accomplishes. The idealized version involves learning critical thinking, exploring ideas, and becoming a well-r

This comic is a graph charting "Esteem for Humanity While Reading an Article on Positive Race Relations" on the y-axis against "Depth in Article" on the x-axis. The line starts near zero at the headli

This comic is titled "Funtime Activity: Sudden Unprovoked Insults." Two people are sitting together, apparently having a friendly conversation, when one of them suddenly pivots to deliver a nerdy insu

This comic is labeled "Geek Parenting Perk #7297352: The Lamest Jokes in the World" and shows a parent telling a knock-knock joke to two children, but the dialogue is presented in reverse order. The c

This comic is titled "Funtime Activity: Pickup Lines That Only Sound Good" and shows a man at a bar saying to a woman: "Baby, if sexual satisfaction is a disease, I'm your cure tonight." The banner fr

This comic explores the philosophical question of whether robots can have souls through a darkly funny afterlife scenario. A man arrives in heaven and asks if his wife will be there. God (or Saint Pet

This comic shows a man on a date delivering an uncomfortably honest monologue: "Before you decide whether you want a second date, you should know that I've contextualized my clingy desperation as a de

This comic tells a tragic story from the perspective of honeybees. Two bees are working in their hive, depositing honey to "preserve the queen and feed the younglings," commenting that love makes hard

This comic shows a teacher standing in front of a class saying: "How do I remember? I just look at my hand, and there's five fingers, and that's about the value of pi." The caption below reads: "Physi

This comic presents a Venn diagram with three large overlapping circles labeled "Love," "Sex," and "Friendship." The expected joke would involve the intersection of all three circles representing an i

This comic opens with someone asking why the Amish, who are among God's most pious followers, are afflicted with a high incidence of polydactyly (extra fingers or toes). The other person responds with

The comic contrasts two phases of life with a simple before-and-after structure. In the top panel, labeled "When You're Little," a mother cheerfully tells a child "Sharing is caring!" -- the classic c

This comic depicts a playful war between a physicist and a mathematician, riffing on the well-known rivalry between the two disciplines. The physicist announces he is about to "subtract infinity from

The comic tackles the common argument against funding pure science -- specifically particle colliders like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). One character complains that giant particle colliders can't

This single-panel comic shows a professor at a lectern presenting a logical argument: "If P is false, I will be sad. I do not wish to be sad. Therefore, P is true." The caption below reads: "There. No

This multi-panel comic tells a sci-fi narrative about free will. It begins with the premise that humans did not have free will because they were "too macroscopic to access quantum randomness" and thus

This single-panel comic shows a man grinning and saying "You know what else is double standard? My penis." The caption below reads: "I'm no longer allowed in Women's Studies class." The joke operates

The comic is titled "Things I Hate: Alpha Nerding" and contrasts two scenarios. In the first panel labeled "Normal Nerd," someone reading a celebrity magazine says "Whoa. Jan and Allan broke up," and

The comic depicts a person seeking out a wise master figure (an old bearded man in robes, resembling a wizard or guru) with an urgent request: he has had an amazing idea but fears someone else will th

The comic shows the Greek hero Achilles in a modern office environment, captioned "Achilles had trouble adjusting to office life." Achilles, depicted as a bearded warrior, is threatening a coworker wi

This comic explores the philosophical question of what counts as "life" through a computational thought experiment. One character shows another a self-replicating program and argues that if life is de

This comic introduces "The Iron Sociopath," a superhero who openly identifies as a sociopath. When a bystander asks why a self-described amoral person would fight crime, he gives a chillingly rational