Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic is set in a dystopian robot-dominated world and plays on the classic science fiction trope of distinguishing between a real entity and an impostor. A robot guard encounters two identical-lo

This comic, titled "Know Your Trolls," categorizes internet trolls using a two-axis alignment system borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons, with the axes being lawful/unlawful and good/evil. The "Unlawful

This comic presents a Venn diagram titled "Every Problem on Earth in One Graph." The left circle (red) represents "People who can financially afford to contemplate the moment beyond now," and the righ

This comic imagines a scenario where the time people "lose" to online RPGs (role-playing games) is not actually lost but rather stored. In the first panel, a gamer wonders where twelve hours went whil

This comic features Batman and the Riddler in an unexpectedly emotional encounter. Batman reads a note from the Riddler and begins to say "That's not even a riddle. You aren't --" before stopping mid-

In this comic, a man tells a woman that he couldn't sleep and was trying to come up with an evolutionary explanation for why humans tend to be monogamous, noting that from a gene's perspective, monoga

This comic parodies the trope of a rogue cop action movie. A police chief yells at an officer named Brian for killing anti-vaccinationists, echoing the classic "loose cannon cop" setup. Brian coolly p

This comic is titled "How to Infuriate a Math Major" and shows a graph where the y-axis is labeled "Labeled Axes on This Graph." The graph shows a line that rises from 0 to approximately 1, indicating

This comic follows a man whose internet connection fails while he is masturbating. He decides to use his imagination instead, "like people used to." In his fantasy, he encounters a woman who is upset

This comic is titled "Culture Is Weird" and shows two men mocking the Indian version of Superman as ridiculous. Below the panel, the comic lists "Things American Superman Does" and "Things Indian Supe

This comic is a multi-panel essay distinguishing between "I'm offended" (a personal emotional reaction) and "It's offensive" (a claim that something is universally objectionable). It walks through sev

This comic presents a 2x2 matrix titled "How to have a happy relationship, explained in one chart." The columns represent whether you do or don't do something nice for your girlfriend, and the rows re

This comic shows a child gleefully pointing at Jesus and exclaiming "Ha! Got you! You're drinking your own blood!" Jesus is shown doing a spit-take in response. The caption reads "Jesus no longer love

This comic is titled "Complex Emotional Situations by Shape" and presents three increasingly chaotic diagrams. It begins with "The Love Triangle," a simple three-person arrangement where each person h

This comic shows a couple in bed after sex. The woman compliments the man, saying "I love the way you yell out during sex." He responds awkwardly with "Oh, I... uh... thanks." The caption below reads:

This comic is titled "How to Make a Scientist's Head Explode." A scientist states that "Anecdotal evidence isn't valid," and a woman responds, "Yes it is! I once used an anecdote as evidence, and late

This comic contrasts the stereotypical attitudes of a computer scientist versus a computer engineer when confronted with an alien computer. The computer scientist approaches the alien technology with

In this comic, a woman asks her partner if it is okay to dress as Batgirl in the bedroom, presenting it sheepishly as "kind of a turn-on." The man in bed looks thrilled at the prospect. Below the pan

This comic imagines what would happen if the President declared a "National Honesty Day" requiring all citizens to tell the truth. At first, the scheme appears to be a brilliant success: the governmen

This Valentine's Day comic presents a bittersweet mathematical metaphor for love and heartbreak. A woman narrates that every time she fell in love, she gave her partner her whole heart, but every time

This comic depicts a couple's argument that escalates through the lens of statistical analysis. The wife accuses her husband of thinking she is ugly, citing that they only have sex with the lights off

This comic plays on the idea of an adolescent male fantasy being taken to absurd extremes. A military general bursts into a man's room and urgently explains that his spaceship needs to reach a "dinosa

This comic uses a Venn diagram to explain why the author refuses to discuss politics with his doctor. Circle A represents "People I argue with," circle B represents "People who get to touch my balls"

This comic presents a darkly humorous Valentine's Day scenario using a mathematical metaphor about emotional damage from past relationships. A woman explains that every time she fell in love, she gave

This comic satirizes the common job interview question "What would you say your greatest weakness is?" by showing a man who has spent years preparing the ultimate answer. The narration explains he spe

This single-panel comic shows a nerdy-looking man using a pickup line on an unimpressed woman: "Hey baby, are you Star Trek? Because I watch you every night in the darkness." The joke subverts the typ

This comic retells the ancient "Paradox of the Court," a famous logical paradox from ancient Greece involving the sophist Protagoras and his student Euathlus. Protagoras agreed to teach Euathlus rheto

This single-panel comic shows a map that looks like a standard political/geographic map of a region (resembling the southern United States or a similar area), but with the words "HERE THERE BE DICKHEA

This comic contrasts a "Normal Wife" with a "Geek Wife" in a scenario where both are pregnant and have the same nightmare about their baby bursting out of their stomach like the alien creature from th

This comic plays on the concept of "object permanence," a developmental psychology term describing the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen. Infants typically dev

This comic, titled "The More Technology Humanity Creates, The Weirder You'''ll Be in Old Age," is a single-panel joke imagining a far-future scenario. An elderly man with white hair and glasses is tel

This comic compares how different fields make people feel inadequate about their accomplishments, with the pressure increasing as the field becomes more abstract. The first panel, labeled "Artist," sh

This comic is a simple graph joke with a philosophical punchline. It shows a chart with "Desire for Sex" on the Y-axis and "Time" on the X-axis. The red curve depicts desire for sex over the course of

This comic imagines what would happen if the high-pitched screaming of teenage girls at pop concerts were weaponized for military interrogation. In the opening panels, a captured prisoner defiantly te

This comic contrasts the desires of children and adults in a simple two-panel format. The top panel, labeled "Children," shows a freckled red-haired kid wearing a superhero cape (with a lightning bolt

This comic presents a single-panel joke about how a political scientist might propose marriage. In the main panel, a woman with dark hair and glasses explains the concept of "Mutually Assured Destruct

This comic traces the entire history of human weapons technology as a progression of ever-more-efficient ways to "randomize" matter -- a darkly clinical euphemism for destroying things and killing peo

This comic uses a bait-and-switch structure built around an elderly grandmother and a bag of rubber bands. In the first few panels, the grandmother is shown holding a bag labeled "Rubber Bands," then

This comic explores the hypocrisy of government-run gambling. In the first panel, a red-haired man asks a bespectacled man (who appears to be reading from a book, suggesting he is some kind of authori

This comic is titled "Know Your Logical Proofs" and presents a humorous taxonomy of proof techniques. It begins with three legitimate logical proof methods: Direct Proof (if P then Q; P; therefore Q),

This comic offers an alternative version of the story of Don Quixote, the famous literary character created by Miguel de Cervantes. In the original novel, Don Quixote is a delusional man who reads too

This single-panel comic is labeled "Engineering Tips" and reads: "Since project delivery times are always underestimated, you might as well lie from the beginning." A colleague asks an engineer when t

This comic draws a parallel between two seemingly unrelated situations. The top panel shows a stereotypical "nice guy" lying in bed, lamenting that a woman he is interested in does not love him despit

This comic presents "Advanced Rules Rock-Paper-Scissors," a parody of how tabletop games and competitive gaming communities tend to overcomplicate simple games with layers of additional rules. It star

This comic shows a man explaining to his friends that he has rigged up a hidden bag of milk in his shirt pocket so he can squirt milk through a hole in his shirt by squeezing it. When asked why he wou

This comic shows a woman using scientific knowledge as a strategy to avoid having sex. She tells her partner: "I'm not sure we should have sex tonight. Men find women most attractive when they're most

This comic imagines a scenario in which aliens have captured humans and are trying to breed them in captivity, similar to how zoos breed endangered species. The joke plays on the idea that human court

This single-panel comic is part of a recurring "Grandfathering Fun Tips" series, which offers humorous advice on how to be an entertaining (or annoying) grandfather. The tip here is that the more anac

This comic presents a graph plotting "belief that love is a sublime wonder beyond comprehension" on the Y-axis against "quality as a long-term significant other" on the X-axis. The resulting curve sho

This comic proposes a motivational message to put in every science textbook, arguing that the typical "real life applications" approach to making science relevant to students is the wrong strategy. In