Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic explores the hierarchy of mathematical hyper-operators through a classroom setting. The professor correctly explains that multiplication is repeated addition (2*3 = 2+2+2), exponentiation i

This is one of SMBC's longer-form comics, presented as a short story titled "The Bachelor." It depicts a satirical narrative about humanity's first contact with aliens. The story follows the mundane a

This comic is a simple Venn diagram joke showing two circles: one labeled "Rap Music" and the other labeled "Discrete Mathematics." The overlapping region in the center is identified as "Frequent use

This comic depicts a man waking up from a recurring nightmare that he describes to his partner. In the dream, a giant werewolf chases him through the forest, catches him, and then delivers an existent

This comic imagines what Hell is actually like. A sinister-looking man (presumably the Devil or a demon) tells a woman that Hell "isn't so different" from life, with one key exception: every time you

This comic, titled "In the Future, Dog Tags Will Be More Functional," shows a military drill sergeant issuing dog tags to a soldier. He explains that the first tag serves the traditional purpose of li

This comic depicts a father answering his child's simple question, "Dad, what's 1+1?" Instead of giving a straightforward answer, the father launches into a deeply philosophical meditation on mathemat

This comic uses a parallel structure to satirize arguments against gay marriage by comparing different types of licenses. It starts with gun licenses, which exist to protect us from dangerous people -

This comic is a Venn diagram titled "Reasons for Invoking God." The left circle, in yellow, is labeled "Calling Damnation Upon Electronics" -- representing the common experience of cursing at malfunct

This comic explores the classic childhood question "Daddy, does Santa Claus exist?" The father gives a heartfelt, philosophical answer: Santa is a "spirit of joy and an avatar of giving." He explains

This comic features a person being arrested by a police officer for smoking marijuana, but instead of going quietly, the person launches into a neuroscience-based defense. She argues that the consciou

This comic is an educational comic about the "glottal stop" -- a speech sound made by halting airflow with the glottis (the part of the larynx containing the vocal cords). The comic explains that in E

This comic tells a melancholy science fiction story about the future of humanity. It opens with a graph showing that computer complexity increases over time while human mental complexity is finite and

This is a single-panel comic showing a father and his young daughter admiring a snow fort she has built. The fort is elaborate -- it includes a snowman positioned behind a snow brick wall, and the sno

This comic uses the metaphor of a CEO and their advisors to describe the experience of consciousness and internal mental conflict. In the first panel, a man in a business suit says "Sometimes I feel l

This comic satirizes the argument that video games cause violence and should be censored. A senator-like figure declares to a female interviewer that there are limits to free speech, that video games

This comic, titled "This is why I'''m not nostalgic for young romance," satirizes the intensity and fragility of teenage relationships. In the first panel, a young man professes his undying love to a

This comic mocks a certain type of complaint about Valentine'''s Day. In the first panel, a man grumbles, "Valentine'''s Day is all a bullshit holiday for women! It'''s dumb! Why isn'''t there a holid

This comic lampoons the common engineer complaint that marketing departments are unnecessary and make everything worse. In the first panel, a group of engineers gripe, "Why do we even need marketing?

This comic reimagines Aesop'''s classic fable of "The Ant and the Grasshopper" through the lens of modern economics. The original fable teaches that the grasshopper, who played all summer while the an

This sprawling comic presents a fictional scenario in which mathematicians discover that mathematics is not composed of eternal rules but is instead "made of machines" -- robust ones, but machines tha

This comic takes the familiar human practice of giving flowers and reframes it from an alien anthropological perspective, making the mundane seem bizarre and violent. The aliens describe humans as con

This comic parodies the Batman franchise'''s tradition of Batman having a gadget for every situation, no matter how absurd. The Joker announces his villainous plan: "I'''ve trapped Vicki Vale in a tit

This single-panel comic (plus header) is titled "The number one rule of parenting is '''remember to have fun.'''" It shows a father kneeling down to comfort his young daughter outside an X-ray room, s

This comic imagines a spy scenario where secret messages are hidden in the most secure location possible: the even-numbered problems of a math textbook. A spy boasts to his handler, "Our messages have

In this comic, a man prays to God asking the classic existential question: "God, what is the meaning of life?" God'''s answer is unexpected and absurd: "Cheese." When the man responds with confusion (

In this comic, the President of the United States addresses the nation, openly acknowledging that the presidency has little actual effect on the economy but receives most of the blame or credit for it

This comic is a two-panel joke about the privilege of naming a scientific discovery. The top caption reads "The best part of discovering a grand unified theory..." and shows a female physicist at a po

This single-panel comic presents a fake historical fact: "The original version of 2001: A Space Odyssey was an advertisement for soup." It shows an astronaut in a space helmet, clearly referencing the

This comic presents a "Fun Fact" in the header banner: "You can always creep people out by introducing a safe word in a nonsexual context." The single panel shows a woman at a podium delivering what a

This comic is drawn in a moody, black-and-white watercolor style rather than the usual SMBC color palette, lending it an introspective, literary tone. A man narrates his own self-image across several

This comic imagines a future where humanity has fully mastered developmental biology, mapping human development from three months before birth to age 25. A scientist announces this breakthrough, and t

This three-panel comic takes a jab at homeopathy by applying its core principle to an unexpected domain. In the first panel, a man confides to his friend that he cannot get a woman to sleep with him b

This comic tackles a well-known frustration among students and educators: the bizarrely persistent high price of graphing calculators. In the first panel, a bespectacled man rants that computers have

This comic depicts a first date between a bespectacled man and a woman, where the man compulsively corrects every piece of pop psychology his date mentions. When she says she is more of a Type-A perso

This comic satirizes the religious narrative that everything happens for a reason as part of God'''s plan. A Sunday school teacher tells a parable about a man who had a terrible day: he slept through

In this comic, a father tells his wife that their son Bobby ate his dinner before she finished making it. The comic then contrasts two possible parental responses. The "Good Parent" panel shows the mo

This comic plays on the famous Rubin's vase optical illusion, in which negative space between two face profiles creates the shape of a vase. In the main panel, a man enthusiastically describes the ill

This comic is a retelling of Genesis 18:20-33, in which Abraham negotiates with God over the fate of Sodom. In the biblical account, Abraham bargains God down from needing 50 righteous people to spare

This comic tackles the classic philosophical question "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" -- a question traditionally used to mock medieval scholasticism as pointlessly abstract. Here, a

This comic offers a darkly philosophical explanation for nightmares. A character becomes lucid in a dream and realizes that he is not the "real" person -- he is just a mental avatar, a temporary consc

This comic features a biology lecturer explaining that horizontal gene transfer has made the traditional "Tree of Life" model inadequate for representing evolutionary relationships. Because horizontal

This comic is not a traditional strip but rather an advertisement or announcement for "Bobby and the Gurg: An illustrated book for sober-minded children," with a prompt to "click here to download." Th

This comic takes on the claim that "AIDS is God's way of punishing homosexuals," a real argument made by some religious conservatives. A man makes this claim, and when asked how he knows, he points to

This comic examines the awkward gap between what a woman wants to hear and what she actually gets when expressing body insecurity. A woman tells a man "I feel like men judge me because I have small br

This comic shows a mother explaining menstruation to her daughter. The mother says "And then once a month, you'll bleed from the vagina for three to five days." The daughter laughs it off dismissively

## The Joke A fairy appears and offers to grant one wish. The person, having read enough stories about wish-granting going wrong, tries to carefully word their wish to avoid loopholes. They specify e

This comic explores the concept of utilitarian ethics taken to its logical -- and absurd -- extreme. A society creates a computer to replace government, programmed to maximize total happiness. At firs

This single-panel comic presents a deadpan theological observation. A man who has apparently arrived at the gates of heaven speaks to St. Peter, who stands behind his traditional podium with an open b

This comic imagines what would happen if cats were actually intelligent enough to have discovered a cure for all disease, but were unable to communicate it to humans. In the first two panels, an orang