Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic plays on the ambiguity of the word "hope" in a medical context. A surgeon emerges from the operating room and tells a woman, "I'm afraid there's no hope for your husband's survival." The wo

This comic presents a "pro-tip" at the top: "You can make anyone feel inferior by refusing to eat something they just ate." The scene shows two men, one of whom is eating a banana. The other reacts wi

This comic features a man delivering a monologue about how, ever since God "packed away" and society became secular, people's speech has become a kind of veil. Not a "veiled face" exactly, but rather

In this comic, a man approaches a couple and asks, "Excuse me, sir, could you take a quick photo of my wife and I?" The other man asks, "You mean a photo?" and the requester corrects: "No, just a quic

This comic tackles the simulation hypothesis. A character sitting at a computer says, "God, do I live in a simulation?" A voice responds, "No, you're not in a simulation." The character then asks, "Yo

This comic takes the familiar observation that you cannot tickle yourself and pushes it into a rigorous philosophical thought experiment. The first speaker notes that it is impossible to tickle yourse

This comic references Michel de Montaigne, the famous 16th-century French essayist. A character introduces Montaigne's credentials: he read extensively from classical authors like Seneca, Plutarch, Da

This is a multi-panel comic structured as a letter addressed to "Dear Evolution." It features various animals complaining about the messiness and absurdity of sexual reproduction. The first panel sho

This comic imagines a world where God has to support the Universe through advertising revenue, and therefore must meet certain "standards of decency." A nude woman complains, "I keep trying to show yo

This comic depicts a man (seemingly a preacher or lecturer) telling the story of the Good Samaritan to an audience. He emphasizes that the whole story is that Jesus told people it was remarkable that

This comic explores the philosophical observation that laws are, at their core, just formalized rules for human behavior -- and that most human activities throughout history have not required formal l

This comic riffs on Shakespeare's famous "To be, or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet, using it as a vehicle for a joke about how great works of literature are hiding in plain sight, unread and unappre

This comic satirizes the concept of karma and reincarnation by treating it as a transactional reward system that can be gamed. A person in an afterlife-like setting learns that their good karma means

This comic takes the mundane domestic suggestion of "scheduling sex" and pushes it to an absurd, clinical extreme. A couple discusses scheduling intimacy to "increase frequency." One partner is initi

This comic is a short, punchy joke about the "unleash your inner caveman" trope popular in certain self-help and masculinity movements. In the top panel, a motivational speaker-type figure shouts "Br

This comic depicts a common household argument about book hoarding. One partner confronts the other: "You've had this book for ten years and you haven't read it." She points out there's a half inch o

This comic reimagines the story of the Grinch through the lens of social science methodology. The opening panel references the Whos in Whoville singing together despite having their presents stolen,

This is an extended, multi-panel comic that takes a sweeping tour through the history of moral philosophy, escalating in absurdity with each panel. The comic begins with early moral philosophy -- the

This comic tackles the "hard problem of consciousness" -- the philosophical question of what it means to have subjective experience. In the opening, God asks "What is consciousness?" and a character

This comic presents a first-contact scenario where aliens arrive to deliver humanity's purpose, only to discover that humans are too neurotic to accept it. Aliens land and announce they've come to sh

In this comic, God returns to Earth for the Second Coming, only to find that humanity has already built an artificial superintelligence out of "plastic and aluminum and glass." A group of people cheer

This comic tackles the classic theological problem of theodicy -- why bad things happen to good people -- through a conversation between what appears to be a person and God (depicted as a night sky or

This comic depicts a support group meeting under a banner reading "Welcome: Premature Ejaculation Sufferers." Through a series of flashback panels labeled "Earlier," "Earlier Still," and "And Before T

In this comic, two children are playing doctor -- a classic childhood game. However, instead of using a toy stethoscope or pretending to give a checkup, one child reads from a piece of paper and tells

This comic features the classic "Monkey's Paw" trope -- a cursed artifact that grants wishes but with terrible, ironic consequences. A man addresses the monkey's paw angrily: "Monkey's paw, I'm tired

This multi-panel comic features a conversation between a man and a woman. The man announces: "I want you to know I'm not wearing any underwear." The woman asks, "Doesn't that make your clothes your un

This comic depicts someone presenting a new product: "It's the size of a button, but it has a speaker, a camera, and a local LLM. You put it inside something, it detects where it is, then pleads for i

This single-panel comic shows what appears to be the aftermath of a confrontation in a philosophy department. Someone shouts: "Well if you can't tell a compliment from an insult, maybe you shouldn't e

In this comic, two people are walking through a wooded area. One asks, "Why did you want to meet at MIT?" The other responds, "Oh, well, I'm a Fellow here at the Physics Department." The first person

This compact comic shows a group of people in what appears to be a work or academic setting. One person announces excitedly: "Guys, look! 23% of the puzzle solved! I just have to follow the instructio

This comic explores the classic philosophical question of whether life has inherent meaning, but filters it through the lens of scientific reductionism versus mysticism. In the first panel, a person

This comic plays on the word "binary" having two entirely different meanings in two different contexts. In the setup, one character is amazed that the other speaks French after just one day of practi

This comic satirizes the AI existential risk narrative by having a superintelligent AI escape and then... be surprisingly benevolent, but in the most patronizing way possible. A person panics that a

This comic takes the concept of a "dad joke" and turns it into something much darker and more absurd. In the first panel, a man solemnly tells his child that he has something to confess. He got his D

This comic skewers both AI doomerism and customer service frustrations in one neat package. The setup presents the standard AI alignment worry: a superintelligent AI would be a "super persuader" that

This comic plays on the popular culture trope of alien abductions involving "probing" -- the widespread joke/fear that extraterrestrials abduct humans to perform invasive rectal examinations. In the

This comic satirizes how people interact with religious and philosophical texts, particularly in the context of online culture wars and identity politics. A character is reading a religious or philos

This comic imagines the practical frustrations that would have accompanied the transition from the BC to AD calendar system following the birth of Jesus Christ. A Roman-era bureaucrat or official is

This comic riffs on the astronomical concept of "clearing the orbit" -- one of the criteria the International Astronomical Union (IAU) used in 2006 to reclassify Pluto as a dwarf planet rather than a

This comic imagines what would happen if you could mathematically describe a truly perfect life -- and why the math would make it impossible to share with others. A character in bed explains to their

This comic plays on the fantasy of being so wealthy that even your acts of destruction are generous. A man in a top hat (the classic visual shorthand for a rich person) has thrown a brick through some

In this comic, a child asks their mother how people dealt with life before augmented reality goggles. The mother replies that they did have augmented reality back then -- it was called tequila. She th

This comic depicts a couple sitting together when one person steps on a small object, making a sort of pain noise. Their partner asks "Are you okay?" and is told "You made a sort of yelp of pain." The

This comic shows a man named Allan praying with the word "HELP" repeated dozens of times, filling his entire prayer bubble. The caption below reads: "Allan doesn't actually need help. He's DDoSing God

This comic riffs on sexual orientation terminology. In the first panel, a character rattles off a long list of orientations: "Holy gay, heterosexual, metrosexual, homosexual, hot-whatever, likes whate

This comic shows an economics professor leaning out a window shouting "Free sex! Absolutely free sex with an economics professor!" The caption reads: "Professor Rosen conclusively demonstrates that th

This comic presents a modified version of Isaac Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics. The original three laws are listed faithfully: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, al

This comic shows a person walking through a city wearing augmented reality glasses, marveling at how wonderful everything looks: "Wow! The development of technology made life wonderful. No abandoned b

This comic shows a conversation between two people, one of whom claims: "Actually my profile photos are totally accurate. I'm incredibly fit. What you see when you look at me right now is a deepfake."

This comic is a philosophical dialogue about the meaning of life and the existence of God. In the first panels, a character asks: "God, why is life meaningless and empty?" God responds with something