Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic takes a real biology fact and uses it to puncture romantic sentimentality. In the first panel, two women watch a pair of lovebirds perched in a tree, and one remarks: "Isn'''t it cute how l

This comic is a semi-autobiographical story about the narrator'''s experience with a barium swallow test -- a medical imaging procedure where the patient drinks a barium solution so that X-rays can ca

This comic satirizes the awkwardness of breaking up by imagining a tech startup that creates a service to simplify relationship endings. It opens with the observation that "Breaking up is awkward" --

This comic presents a neuroscience-meets-theology scenario at the gates of heaven. A man arrives and asks St. Peter "Did I make it?" St. Peter responds: "Partially." He then proceeds to judge the man

This comic depicts a first-contact scenario between aliens and humanity, with an unexpected twist about leadership criteria. Cone-shaped aliens arrive with their spaceships and demand: "Humans! We dem

This comic contrasts a "typical coming out" with a "mad scientist coming out." In the top panel, labeled "Typical Coming Out," a young woman stands between her parents and says: "Mom, Dad, I'''m gay."

This comic imagines God as a statistician who has been looking at aggregate data without examining the distribution. A priest asks the classic theological question: "God... why do bad things happen to

This comic contrasts the behavior of scientists in two different contexts: discussing papers versus discussing grants. The top panel, labeled "When Scientists Discuss Papers," shows a bespectacled sci

This comic takes the form of a pseudo-scientific infographic about a deliberately absurd topic. It presents a graph showing "Penis Volume of Typical Individual" over a 24-hour period, with the y-axis

This comic is presented under the banner "SMBC Presents: Omitted Bible Passages," imagining a humorous exchange between Judas and Jesus that didn'''t make it into the scriptural canon. Judas awkwardly

This comic imagines physicists as pets, following the life cycle of a "pet physicist" in the style of a veterinary visit. A couple brings their physicist to the doctor, explaining that "something'''s

This comic follows a daughter named Susie playing a prank on her father. In the opening panels, we see a close-up of hands rubbing together over a glass of water. The father catches her in the act and

## The Joke A physicist claims they can solve any problem in any field because everything reduces to physics. They are then presented with an actual problem from biology, economics, or social science

This comic follows a pregnant woman with glasses who announces: "Once I give birth, I'''ll be like Spiderman." In the next panel she exclaims "Aha! There we go!" and the scene shifts to show her using

This comic tells an epic satirical narrative about humanity creating a superior race of beings. Fearing a nuclear apocalypse, scientists create "new humans" who are superior in every way. However, the

This comic plays on the classic relationship advice trope of "pick two out of three." An elderly father with a cane asks his son, "How'''s the ol''' marriage treatin''' ya?" The son responds by refere

This comic presents a satirical doomsday narrative about bottled water taken to its logical extreme. It begins with the observation that "people decided putting water in a bottle made it better," show

This comic presents a timeline of humanity'''s search for extraterrestrial intelligence, spanning from 2100 to 3000. By 2100, we have confirmed we have the solar system to ourselves after exploring ev

In this comic, a professor is lecturing about cardioids -- heart-shaped curves produced by certain polar equations (r = a(1 - cos theta)). He complains that the naming convention is confusing because

This comic is a math-themed insult joke. A woman angrily shouts at a man: "Oh yeah?! Well, the sine of your penis approximately equals your penis!" The caption below reads "Math insults are the best i

This comic takes the classic Peter Pan scene literally. In the first panel, Peter Pan cheerfully tells the children "Second star to the right and straight on till morning!" -- his famous directions to

This comic contrasts a "Normal Child" with a "Future Politician." In the first scenario, a mother tells her son Bobby that he can'''t have dessert until he finishes dinner. Bobby reluctantly says "Aww

This is a long-form comic where a female student visits a professor'''s office, suggestively offering to do something for him if he'''ll change her grade. The professor, an elderly man who has been ma

This single-panel comic shows an old man pointing to his mouth and telling a group of children "It all goes in here." The caption reads: Grandpa refers to this as his "circle of life." The joke is a c

In this comic, a man on a date is told by his companion that she doesn'''t have sex on a first date. Rather than accepting this gracefully, he launches into an elaborate philosophical argument about e

This comic plays with Arthur C. Clarke'''s famous Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The first panel illustrates the classic version -- a group of peopl

This comic shows a bedroom scene where a woman in underwear is clearly trying to initiate intimacy, but her partner -- a nerdy-looking man reading a book in bed -- has apparently just used a bizarre s

In this comic, a frustrated person is arguing with a creationist, shouting: "Augh! No! This is why people don'''t like creationists. Correlation does not imply causality!" This is a common scientific

This comic contrasts two approaches to parenting under the headings "Normal Parenting" and "Effective Parenting." In the first panel, labeled "Normal Parenting," a parent with glasses tells their teen

This comic features a conversation between a young girl and her father about war. The girl asks, "Dad, why do people fight wars?" Her father explains, "Well, usually there are two sides and they have

This single-panel comic shows two elderly Jehovah'''s Witnesses sitting on a couch drinking tea, while a man brings them more tea on a tray. The man says, "Oh, I probably should'''ve mentioned this be

This comic satirizes helicopter parenting and the ironic lack of self-awareness that often accompanies it. A parent calls a teacher, Mrs. Stratton, to aggressively argue that their daughter'''s essay

This comic explores the simulation argument -- the philosophical idea, popularized by Nick Bostrom, that our reality might be a computer simulation. Two characters discuss whether we live in a simulat

This comic uses a simple graph format to satirize how politicians view the stock market compared to ordinary people. The top half, labeled "How Most People View the Stock Market," shows a standard pri

This comic depicts a clash between a physicist and a group of Buddhist monks over the classic philosophical koan, "If a tree falls in the woods and no one'''s around to hear, does it make a sound?" Th

This comic offers a crude, irreverent imagining of the origin of the Pope'''s tall pointed hat (the mitre). In the first panel, an older man (implied to be the Pope or a high-ranking clergyman) is sho

This comic reimagines the classic nursery rhyme "There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe" through a grimly realistic modern lens. It begins by following the familiar rhyme structure: "There was an

This comic imagines the relationship between humans and cats before the invention of laser pointers. In the main panel, a cat and a human face each other in a scene of mutual dignity and respect. The

This comic features a physicist named Dr. Lee standing at a lectern, delivering a lecture. He says: "And, as we can see here, not all constants are multiples of ten and several objects are neither sph

This comic shows a parent reading a bedtime story to a child -- the classic fable of Harun al-Rashid, the Abbasid caliph who searched for a happy man and found one who was so poor he did not even own

This comic satirizes the unrealistic depiction of superpowers in comic books by examining the real-world consequences of the Flash's super-speed. When told that Captain Boomerang has thrown a woman of

This comic contrasts "Movie Hacking" with "Real Hacking." In the top panel, a stereotypical movie hacker frantically strings together nonsensical tech jargon -- "If I can just overclock the Unix Djang

This comic satirizes the way modern liberal guilt addresses historical injustices against Native Americans. A boy asks his mom if he and Bobby can play "Cowboys and Indians," and his mother declares t

This comic contrasts the actual meaning of the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment with how most people understand it. The top panel, labeled "What 'Schrodinger's Cat' means," shows a professorial fi

This comic imagines a conversation between Jesus and God (represented as a large golden oval) after Jesus's time on Earth. God asks how it went, and Jesus brings up his famous water-into-wine miracle.

This comic features a young boy named Bobby delivering a grandiose nihilistic monologue to his parents about the ultimate fate of humanity. He describes a future where humans conquer disease, conquer

This comic reimagines office life from a cat's perspective. A cheerful boss gives a new employee a tour, describing the mundane realities of office work in the most alienating terms possible: "Here's

This comic imagines a post-apocalyptic scenario where the only survivors of a nuclear blast are people at frat parties, since only those who had recently consumed gasoline mixed with energy drinks cou

This comic depicts a nerdy scientist telling his date about how he spliced fly DNA into his own genome to gain "their powers," an obvious reference to the classic horror story "The Fly." His date reac

This comic, published on February 12 (just before Valentine's Day 2012), presents a deliberately tasteless Valentine's Day card. The card reads "We're Tou(rette's) of a Kind!" -- a pun combining "two