Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The comic shows a cat saying "Mow?" while a woman lies in bed, followed by a close-up of her horrified face and then an extreme close-up of her eye with the cat reflected in it. The humor comes from t

This comic takes aim at the Golden Rule -- "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" -- by exposing a logical edge case. Jesus delivers the famous ethical teaching, and a man responds that h

This comic features "The Regenerating Man," a superhero who can regrow lost body parts. When the villain Baron Blade attacks him with a buzzsaw, the hero is cut in half -- but both halves regenerate i

A child in bed during a thunderstorm is scared of lightning. His mother, rather than comforting him, says "Oh, don't worry, that'll just help you see the clowns coming." The caption reads: "Technicall

In this comic, a couple is in bed and something has gone wrong with a condom ("It broke?"). The woman suggests the classic IT troubleshooting advice: "Just take it off and put it on again." The captio

This comic explores the concept of a "just war" through a thought experiment. Two soldiers from opposing sides of a conflict have killed each other simultaneously and arrive in the afterlife, where a

This comic is a pie chart titled "Time Spent Sending a Sexy Note." The overwhelming majority of the pie (in purple) represents "Confirming you have the correct email address," while only a tiny sliver

A teenage girl nervously asks her father if he could get her "some... protection" for senior prom night. The father calmly replies "Not a problem." The next panel, labeled "Later...," shows the father

In this comic, a woman gives a scientific presentation explaining that she had two men interested in her but couldn't decide between them, so she devised an experiment: she fired a photon through a be

The comic begins as an educational explainer about "while loops" in computer programming. It shows a standard flowchart diagram of how a while loop works: a condition is checked, and if true, a statem

The comic tackles the classic philosophical question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" -- one of the deepest questions in metaphysics, famously posed by Leibniz. A woman asks a rabbi this

This wordless comic plays on the concept of Cupid, the Roman god of love who shoots arrows to make people fall in love. In the first panel, a cheerful boy is whistling as he walks along. In the second

The comic starts with a dramatic, emotionally devastating setup: a mother tearfully tells her children that "Daddy won't be with us for much longer." She explains that he was genotyped about a year ag

This comic presents two rows of images showing a woman aging from childhood through old age. The top row, labeled "How It Looked," shows the straightforward visual progression: a little girl grows int

The comic is titled "Funtime Activity #179,256: Infiltrating Other People's Protests." It shows a group of protesters, with a man in the center holding a large sign that reads: "It's Adam and Eve prop

The comic is titled "Eventually, Everything Is Normal." In the first panel, a man is horrified, shouting the famous line from the 1973 film *Soylent Green*: "Soylent Green is PEOPLE. PEEEEEOPLE!" -- e

The comic depicts a phone call between a pollster and an elderly woman. The caller introduces themselves as being from the "American Polling Foundation" and asks if the woman believes humans evolved f

The comic shows a man gleefully declaring victory over a salad bar's pay-by-weight pricing system. He announces to the clerk that he has outsmarted them by filling his bowl with nothing but the most e

The comic shows a woman delivering an elaborate "pickup line" to a man, structured as a perfectly optimized mating proposition from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. She offers to raise thei

A friend tells the red-haired man that he has too much going on and that's why he's stressed. The man dismisses this perfectly reasonable advice, saying he needs it stated by "an individual who is soc

Two people are having what seems like an erudite conversation about Sherlock Holmes, discussing how Arthur Conan Doyle's original character famously knew nothing of philosophy or astronomy, and also h

This comic reimagines Garfield -- the famously lazy, lasagna-loving cat -- as a deeply existential, cosmically tortured being. Instead of his usual simple complaints, Garfield delivers an extended phi

A man tells his partner he wanted to do something special for their anniversary. He explains that he assigned a numerical value to each genetic code letter (A, G, T, C mapped to 0, 1, 2, 3), then extr

A child tells his father there's a monster in the closet. The father goes to check, and the reveal shows a literal monster sitting on the child's bed with the child, saying "I only watch gay porn for

Two aliens (identified in the caption as "Zorblaxians") are reading a book together. One reads aloud: "And then the other one starts talking about justice like it's an objective physical law." The oth

A child asks his father if he can leave the hall lights on at night because he's scared. Rather than simply saying yes or no, the father launches into an elaborate cosmological thought experiment: he

A man is lying in bed, apparently after or during an intimate moment with his partner. He holds up his hand, staring at it in amazement, exclaiming "Whoooaaa..." His partner says "Baby, come back over

This comic tells a cosmic parable. Beings outside our universe created it as an experiment to observe the behavior of life. Worried that different life forms might not be able to communicate, they bui

A young man asks a priest why the Church opposes Dungeons and Dragons, pointing out that it's all pretend and there's no chance of players actually becoming murderers or witches. The priest agrees --

In this comic, a man uses the classic romantic cliche "Baby, for you I would scale the highest mountain, swim the deepest ocean..." to profess his love. His partner, unimpressed by empty promises, cal

This comic makes a case for investing in sociology by drawing an analogy to weather forecasting. The first panel acknowledges sociology's imperfections, showing a satirical academic paper titled "Huma

This comic explores a dark science-fiction thought experiment about a brain chip that alters a person's perception of time. A hostage-taker threatens to kill a boy, but the boy's mother reveals she ha

## The Joke A utilitarian (someone who believes the right action is the one that maximizes total happiness) follows their philosophy to its logical extreme and arrives at deeply counterintuitive conc

In this comic, a person uses a time machine to see what future humans will look like, reasoning that since "only the fittest reproduce," evolution should produce "musclebound supergeniuses" after thou

This comic imagines what a Victorian-era TV soap opera would look like. Two characters dressed in Victorian clothing -- complete with top hats -- engage in dramatic, soap-opera-style dialogue, but the

This comic depicts a man facing a major life decision -- whether to stay in a job he hates or take a risky new opportunity -- and consulting various "inner selves" for advice. His inner child suggests

This comic depicts an aggressive negotiation between a literary agent and a publisher over a book deal. The two go back and forth with increasingly hostile demands, insults, and ultimatums -- "His wri

This comic plays on the phrase "quantum leap," which in everyday language is used to mean a huge, dramatic advance or breakthrough. In the first panel, a frantic aide asks for "a term that actually me

This comic satirizes the "teach the controversy" approach to education -- a phrase most associated with efforts to present creationism alongside evolution in science classrooms. A teacher announces sh

This comic presents a graph plotting "Creepiness" (y-axis) against "Time spent staring at a woman's breasts" (x-axis), showing how social perception changes as staring duration increases. The curve st

This comic is a riff on Robert Nozick's famous "Experience Machine" thought experiment from his 1974 book *Anarchy, State, and Utopia*. A woman asks a man whether he would enter a hallucination machin

This single-panel comic, titled "Ethics gets weird when you try to account for future results," explores a consequentialist thought experiment involving Batman. A person reads a note that works throug

This comic takes the classic anti-lawyer joke -- "What do you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the sea? A good start!" -- and gives it a literal, absurdist twist. Instead of the expected punch

This comic satirizes the "how do we explain this to our children?" argument that was commonly used against gay marriage. A senator tells a reporter that gay marriage shouldn't be allowed because it's

This comic features a father explaining to his son Bobby what Christmas gifts really mean, revealing cynical and manipulative motivations behind each one. He got his mother-in-law a holiday emblem inc

This comic plays on the awkwardness of "the talk" -- the traditional parental conversation about sex and reproduction. A mother is sitting on a bed with her daughter, holding a book titled "Your Body,

This comic takes a theological concept about God's relationship to time and applies it in an irreverent direction. In the first panel, a priest explains that God exists beyond human conceptions of tim

This comic is a long-form poem presented in the style of an illustrated epic, telling the story of a hacker who stumbles into the source code of reality itself. The narrator describes hacking for 40 d

This comic begins with a woman delivering a poetic and emotionally resonant monologue about the paradox of love and mortality. She observes that those who do not love die only once, but those who love

This comic tackles two of the biggest questions in philosophy and theology: "Why do bad things happen to good people?" (the problem of evil) and "Why is there something rather than nothing?" (the fund