Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

## The Joke A character approaches dating with the same rigor they'd apply to a scientific experiment or engineering problem: setting up controlled variables, defining success metrics, running A/B te

This comic applies the concept of financial prediction markets to the most inappropriate possible domain: a couple'''s sex life. The man excitedly announces that according to his online prediction mar

This comic offers a darkly comedic reinterpretation of the Arthurian legend of the Sword in the Stone. A young person asks the king how pulling a sword from a stone could possibly make someone king, q

This comic portrays sperm cells as a military unit on a mission, presented like a war movie scenario. A commanding sperm (the "Sarge") rallies his troops with "Hurry up, men! There'''s no time to spar

This comic plays on the concept of moral relativism by turning it into a literal monster-under-the-bed scenario. In the first panel, a mother is tucking her young son into bed, telling him "No more ph

This comic is a Halloween-themed joke about the technology generation gap between parents and grandparents. In the first panel, a man calls his mother on the phone, explaining that these days you can

This comic imagines a follow-up conversation between Jesus and his followers about the command to "give all that you have to the poor." In the first panel, Jesus delivers the familiar biblical instruc

In this comic, a man compares his love to "the scene in Hamlet where he flies into the clouds and dances in the constellations as harps and flutes make a crescendo of joy." His partner looks flattered

This is a wordless, experimental comic that traces the lifecycle of human thought and communication. It begins with a parent figure speaking to a baby -- the speech bubble is depicted as a simple, fla

This single-panel comic shows a man holding a piece of paper and telling an annoyed-looking woman: "According to Science, women should perform fellatio at least twice a day." Below the panel, a captio

This comic features a child questioning a priest about the biblical story of Adam and Eve. The child asks: "Wait, Eve was made from Adam'''s rib?" The priest confirms. The child then follows the logic

This comic is a multi-generational satire that imagines a future where pornography is so mainstream that it has its own rating system and generational culture wars -- just like movies and TV do today.

This comic presents a graph showing "Primary Household Breadwinner" on the Y-axis and "Time" on the X-axis. Initially, the "men" line is high and dominant while the "women" line is low. Around the poi

This comic is titled "How Academics Call Something Boring (By Discipline)" and features four panels, each showing a scholar from a different field reading a paper and delivering their discipline'''s v

This comic tells a science-fiction story about cryogenic preservation. The narration explains that the first cryogenic patients were frozen too slowly, causing ice crystals to form and rupture too man

This comic reimagines Superman'''s approach to crime-fighting. In the first panels, an old woman is being mugged at knifepoint and cries "Help! Help!" A Superman-like hero arrives, but the mugger noti

This comic contrasts the foundations of romantic relationships versus parental relationships. The top panel is labeled "Basis of Romantic Relationships: Mutual Acceptance" and shows two people facing

This single-panel comic depicts a man lying in bed at night, caught in the grip of an irrational late-night anxiety spiral. His thought bubble reads: "Wait a sec... did I close the windows so tightly

This comic features a father (or grandfather) attempting to impart wisdom to a young boy using the famous George Santayana quote: "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it." The child ta

This comic is titled "The Adventures of the Clairvoyant Premature Ejaculator." It shows a man and a woman meeting, seemingly on a date. They look at each other, and then the man suddenly exclaims "BWA

This comic contrasts "Good Science Teaching" with "Fun Science Teaching." In the top panel, labeled "Good Science Teaching," a teacher tells a student: "Every time you take a breath, you're breathing

This comic depicts a young boy experiencing puberty and reacting to his first erection with the analytical mindset of a budding scientist or mathematician. He exclaims: "My first erection! It's... oh

This comic contrasts how the same story is framed in a modern academic setting versus how it was originally told centuries ago. In the top panel, a literature professor reads to his students from a bo

This comic plays with the well-known analogy "Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation," which is traditionally used to argue that physics is the more applied and fulfilling discipline while math

This comic tells a visual story about a helicopter pilot who spots someone stranded on a small island with "HELP" written in the sand. The pilot flies toward the island, but crashes the helicopter. We

This comic contrasts a "College Nihilist" with a "Real Nihilist." In the top panel, labeled "College Nihilist," a passionate young man is dramatically lecturing his friends: "Don't you guys get it? No

This comic explores the ethics of vegetarianism through a reductio ad absurdum argument. A woman with red hair announces she is a vegetarian because she does not like killing conscious beings for food

This comic is a fantasy scenario about the ultimate masculine power move: having a retractable beard. A man and woman are on a date at a restaurant when the woman suddenly exclaims, "Well, I think tha

This comic plays on the distinction between "the humanities" and science. A mad scientist with blonde hair and glasses is working in her lab alongside a disembodied head kept alive in a tank of green

This single-panel comic takes place on an airplane and satirizes the pre-flight safety announcement about turning off electronic devices. The captain announces over the intercom: "Before we get underw

This comic imagines a press conference announcing the discovery of extraterrestrial life on Enceladus (one of Saturn'''s moons, which really does have a subsurface ocean that scientists consider a can

This comic presents a formal logical proof that USB cables exist in four-dimensional space, based on the universally relatable frustration of trying to plug in a USB cable. The comic shows a sequence:

This comic is a satire of political scandal culture, using a fictional product called "Sponch" as a stand-in. A man bursts into a room shouting, "Listen up everyone! The '''Sponch''' the government ha

This comic reimagines the childhood game of "playing doctor" -- where kids innocently examine each other -- as "playing Doctor of Philosophy." A girl asks a red-haired boy named Bobby if he wants to p

This two-panel comic makes a joke about the inevitability of crude humor in science. The first panel is captioned "September 1981: The first scanning tunneling microscope is created" and shows the mic

This wordless four-panel comic tells the story of a lost cat scam. In the first panel, a blonde woman stands on her porch looking worried. In the second panel, she posts a "Lost Cat - $200 Reward" fly

This comic presents a dialogue between what appears to be a philosophy professor and an economics professor (or student). The setup involves a classic ethical thought experiment: if you were in a burn

This comic tackles the classic theological problem of evil (theodicy) -- why do bad things happen to good people? In the first panel, a child asks a father figure this age-old question, and the adult

This comic plays on the rivalry between academic disciplines, specifically physics and sociology. In the first panel, a physicist smugly boasts to a sociologist that physics has just produced an invis

This comic takes the classic parent-child game of "Got yer nose!" and stretches it into a long con. In the first three panels, a father repeatedly plays the nose-grabbing game with his young red-haire

This comic contrasts the romanticized expectation of being a doctor with the unglamorous reality. The top panel is labeled "What you think being a doctor will be like" and shows a dramatic scene where

This is a single-panel comic featuring a doctor (identifiable by the head mirror) who says: "Oh! I don't know why this just popped into my head, but do you wanna see pictures of my trip to the Grand C

This comic is a relationship humor strip about the gap between romantic declarations and practical demonstrations of love. A man begins telling a woman the classic romantic line: "Baby, I would climb

This comic plays on the common defense of evolution that compares it to gravity. In the first panel, a woman at a debate podium states: "Evolution isn't a 'theory' in the common sense. Evolution is as

This is a long-form comic that tells an absurdist alternate-history story structured like a documentary or historical narrative. It begins with economists noticing that gay couples tend not to have ch

This comic plays on the awkwardness of parents trying to hide their sex life from their children using absurd cover stories. In the first panel, a father tells his young child that since it is Thursda

This comic introduces "The Contextualization Fairy," a magical creature who appears whenever people are having a reasonable discussion and reframes it as a larger social justice issue, derailing the c

This comic depicts a series of encounters between ancient Greek rulers and the Oracle at Delphi, satirizing the famous historical tradition of ambiguous prophecies. A warrior asks the Oracle if he sho

This comic tells the true story of Dr. Louise Reiss and the "Baby Tooth Survey" conducted in the 1960s. Concerned about the health effects of nuclear testing, Dr. Reiss collected hundreds of thousands

Two zombies are sitting together eating human victims. One zombie is eating a male victim, and the other zombie calls him out: "You're eating *dudes*? GAYYYY." The caption below reads: "I'm beginning