Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

A woman is seen making a pinhole with her finger and peering through it. When asked what she is doing, she explains the "pinhole trick" -- by making a tiny opening with your finger and looking through

A child asks his father, an engineer, for help with a "spot the difference" puzzle. Rather than sitting down and working through it with his son, the father scans the puzzle into a computer and uses i

The comic is titled "Scientists Have Much Better Pickup Lines" and shows a man at what appears to be a bar using scientific terminology to hit on a woman. He says, "So... now that we've had this memet

This comic satirizes airport security by imagining a future where TSA screening procedures have escalated to absurd, invasive extremes. An elderly man tells his grandchildren that things used to be di

The comic follows an academic who visits a restaurant (likely a Hooters-style establishment) where all the waitresses share a similar appearance. She confronts the owner using scientific language, ask

This single-panel comic shows Abraham Lincoln pulling down the pants of another man while shouting "Take that, Salmon P. Chase!" The caption below reads "Abraham Lincoln: Great Emancipator. Great Epan

This comic presents a dystopian narrative about a society where "psychological engineering" leads the government to ban sadness in the name of productivity. The story follows a logical progression of

This comic tells a science fiction story about programmers who create a program capable of writing new programs. While spot-checking the machine's output, they notice a growing proportion of gibberish

The comic shows a Cthulhu-like creature -- an octopus or squid-headed being -- dressed as a Christian priest, wearing a clerical collar and sitting in a chair reading a Bible (marked with a cross on t

The comic features an old man with a combover who notices women snickering at his hairstyle. Rather than being embarrassed, he confidently presents a three-point argument for why his combover actually

The comic is titled "Fun With Language! Episode #6283: Half-Euphemisms" and presents a series of vignettes where characters use phrases that are half euphemism and half literal terminology. For pregna

The comic shows two children -- a boy and a girl -- lying on a hillside at night, looking up at the stars. The girl asks whether they might find each other's bodies attractive once they hit puberty, e

This comic explores the existential discomfort of the universe's indifference to personal tragedy. The narration observes that when you experience loss -- such as the death of a loved one -- the laws

This comic presents a biological and philosophical meditation on personal identity. It begins with the common intuition that you are "a single unified life form," then systematically deconstructs that

This comic is a simple graph joke in the style of an XKCD-like chart. The y-axis measures "how likely a person is to give you unsolicited advice about something," while the x-axis measures "how comple

This comic satirizes selective skepticism. In the first panel, two men discuss "right wing science denialists," with one complaining that these people have been "socially brainwashed to believe things

This comic riffs on famous stories of scientific insight being sparked by vivid mental imagery. It starts with two well-known examples: Kekule reportedly envisioned a snake eating its own tail, which

This comic draws a comparison between two situations where you know it is time to leave. The first panel shows the classic scenario of coal miners with a canary in a cage -- the "canary in the coal mi

This comic is an installment in SMBC's recurring "Science: Ruining Everything Since 1543" series. A supervillain announces he has combined the DNA of history's greatest conquerors -- Genghis Khan, Ale

This comic plays on the awkwardness of "conception day" -- the logical but uncomfortable implication of birthdays. A family stands at a party wearing party hats, but instead of a birthday cake, they a

This comic is an extended "Who's on First?"-style wordplay routine built entirely around chemical element abbreviations. A student desperately asks his friend for help with a chemistry test, and every

This comic follows a father's internal monologue as his daughter asks the seemingly simple question, "Daddy, is there a puppy heaven?" He maps out two paths: he can say no and make her sad, or he can

This comic depicts the universally relatable experience of intrusive thoughts about past embarrassments. In the first panel, a man is walking along happily, whistling to himself. Then a message appear

This comic plays with a mathematical observation about the relationship between a parent's age and their child's age. The caption at the top states that there is only one day in your life when your ag

This comic is titled "Funtime Activity: Anti-Sexism" and features a man grabbing a woman's shoulder while shouting, "Woman! Get in the kitchen! I've put a number of Margaret Atwood novels in there, wh

This comic riffs on William Paley's famous "watchmaker analogy," a classic argument for intelligent design. In the original argument, Paley proposed that if you found a watch on the ground, its intric

This comic shows a British man at a police station in America, desperately reporting that his wife has been missing for three days and that he received a bloody ear in an envelope. The police officer,

This comic is about the debate over whether herbal tea is "real" tea. In the first panel, a woman reacts with disgust to being served herbal tea, asking "What the hell is this?" The man cheerfully exp

This comic is a wordless visual narrative in which a child asks his grandfather, "Grampa... how'd you get so old?" The grandfather replies, "Well..." and then the comic shows an extended action sequen

## The Joke A machine passes the Turing Test — convincing a human judge that it's human through conversation. But it doesn't pass by being intelligent; it passes by being evasive, changing the subjec

This comic features a parrot squawking a surprisingly sophisticated philosophical argument: "My trained use of words and phrases in appropriate context is not fundamentally different from human commun

This comic presents a graph titled "Why I Won't Join Your Movement." The x-axis represents the number of members in a group, while two lines track different variables as group size increases. The blue

This comic contrasts a teenager's self-perception with how their parents actually see them. In the top panel, labeled "What You Thought," a smug teenager wearing an anarchy symbol t-shirt thinks to hi

This comic satirizes the common tendency among older people to view all societal change as decline. A younger woman pushes back against an old man's pessimism by pointing out concrete improvements: sc

This comic plays on the trope of an old man being called a creep for staring at a young woman. When confronted, the old man delivers a surprisingly poetic and philosophical defense: he claims his smil

This comic is a parody of instructional guides, presented as "Sex Technique #2718: The Ferrous Phallus." The steps describe cutting jagged slits into a condom wrapper so that it can be torn open drama

This comic tells the story of a company that discovers its employees' workplace anger can be harvested as a literal energy source. It begins when they install a recreation room with punching bags hook

This comic plays on the idea of asking God for a sign. A young man prays, saying that his priest Father Gerald told him masturbation is bad, but he is unsure. He announces he is going to watch "wholes

This comic plays with the romantic notion that ancient people must have ascribed mystical significance to natural phenomena. Two modern people discover a naturally occurring vein of silica that functi

This comic explains the real-life lifecycle of trematode parasites (flukes) that manipulate their hosts' behavior. The parasite infects a horn snail and castrates it to reproduce. It then releases cer

This comic poses the question: "What if scientists had the same standards as pundits?" A person asks a scientist how he knows the Earth is a cube, and the scientist replies, "Well, I thought it once,

This comic features two women lying on the grass looking at clouds. One asks what the other sees. Her companion dismisses the activity as stupid, declaring that clouds are just random moisture blobs a

This comic applies mathematical reasoning to the common romantic expression "I love you more each and every day." A man sits in a cafe, noticing a woman scowling at him and wondering if he knows her.

The comic tells the story of a man whose cat is dying. Learning his cat has a terminal condition, he decides to give the cat the ultimate feline bucket list experience. He tosses the cat into a ball p

This comic reinterprets the familiar sound of a crying baby. It proposes that babies are not actually saying "waaahhh!" but are instead screaming "whyyyyy!?" -- as in an existential cry questioning th

This comic is titled "Why I Have No Friends, Reason #1729: Unimpressive Mindblowing Facts." A woman with glasses excitedly shares what she considers a fascinating observation: the word "recursion" con

The comic shows a little girl storming away from her father, declaring "You. People. Are. Disgusting." The father, holding a book, asks the mother "What was that about?" The mother explains that she w

This comic features an old man delivering a nostalgic speech about how things were better "when I was growing up." His claims include not having to work hard to pay bills, being able to poop wherever

This comic retells the classic fable of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." A boy repeatedly tells townspeople there is a wolf when there is none, and they come running each time. Eventually, when a real wolf a

The comic shows a geeky woman with glasses enthusiastically telling another woman, "Hey! If you dropped dead tomorrow, I wouldn't even think about going to your funeral!" She clearly means this as a c