Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

## The Joke This comic is a promotional/meta strip rather than a traditional joke comic. Zach Weinersmith uses the strip to promote his book *A City on Mars* (co-authored with his wife Kelly Weinersm

## The Joke Two people stand near a collapsed structure — what appears to be the ruins of a fortress or prison. One asks "But how? It just collapsed." The other explains that they asked for a last me

## The Joke A professor (identified in the caption as "Professor Edwards") stands at a chalkboard explaining a finding about a card game. He states that "players act as if there are meaningful ups an

## The Joke A professor stands at a chalkboard showing a diagram of the classic trolley problem — the ethical thought experiment where you must choose whether to divert a trolley to kill one person i

## The Joke The comic is set in 4028 BC. A medieval-looking king or lord is furious because his scribes "attempted to enter the scriptorium at the same time and are trapped." A wizard or advisor deli

## The Joke A person asks God whether He is truly all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. God confirms, but adds "not at the same time" — He can only focus on one attribute at a time. When He focuse

## The Joke The comic explores the classic Star Trek transporter philosophical dilemma. A crew member asks whether the transporter works by disassembling your body, converting it to energy, beaming i

This comic plays on the classic "grandfather paradox" of time travel. In the first panel, a man declares: "I don't think time travel is possible. If it were, I could go back in time and kill my own gr

This comic tackles Thomas Kuhn's theory of paradigm shifts in science. In the first panel, a man confronts a caricature of Thomas Kuhn, saying: "Hey Thomas Kuhn -- your paradigm theory is wrong. Scien

This single-panel comic shows Snow White sitting in a forest clearing, arms outstretched, calling out: "Come to me, woodland mammals!" Various forest animals -- a deer, raccoons, and others -- are gat

In this comic, a child asks their mother: "Mom, Dad said I was an accident. You know you can tell me." The mother firmly responds: "Nope!" In the third panel, the mother explains her reasoning: "The

This comic explores the idea of what it would take to make people genuinely want to be on social media. In the first panel, someone asks: "So why do you want to work in social media?" A figure (seemin

This comic shows a woman praying at night: "Dear God, grant me a life of ease and happiness. Give me riches without hard work. Give me success without failure. Relationships without obligation. Gimme

This comic shows an adult reading a fairy tale to a group of young children. The text being read aloud is the gruesome ending of the original Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella: "And for their wicke

This comic shows a classic romantic gesture: a small airplane trailing a banner that reads "JENNY SMITH, WILL YOU MARRY ME?" A woman on the ground responds ecstatically: "I will! Oh my God!" But besid

This comic shows a group of medieval or ancient soldiers, with one addressing the others: "Wait, wait. You think it's an epic? The story where the guy comes out of the woods, bangs a prostitute for 7

This comic shows a knight confronting what appears to be a demon or devil trapped behind some kind of barrier or cage. The knight declares: "You wouldn't kill our enemies?" The demon responds with a "

The comic opens with someone calling out to "Steve Jenkins" and telling him to get in a car because "your country needs your skills." Steve is bewildered, saying he never thought his work in "thanks"

The comic is a philosophical dialogue about consciousness, structured as a conversation between two characters -- one appears to be God or a cosmic entity (shown as a glowing figure), and the other is

The comic features a person being told "You could be the next big spiritual leader!" to which they respond "Why?" The recruiter then lays out a step-by-step progression of what being a cult leader act

The comic depicts two ancient Greek philosophers standing by a river, referencing the famous fragment attributed to Heraclitus: "No man steps in the same river twice." In the first panel, one philosop

The comic shows two people walking on a street. One says: "I've been playing a game where I assign numerical values to letters based on their position in the alphabet, then I check to see if they sum

The comic reimagines the Garfield comic strip with a dark, realistic twist. In the first panel, Jon cheerfully announces: "Garfield! I made your favorite -- lasagna!" In the second panel, Garfield res

The comic depicts a conversation about copyright and AI. In the first panel, someone says: "Wait, so we got sued by all those writers because we scraped their books?" Another responds: "So we were onl

The comic shows a father-son conversation that takes a bizarre biological turn. The son says: "Hey Dad." The father responds warmly, and the son continues: "We understand and thank you for telling us

The comic presents a graph titled "Mad Scientific Purity" on the x-axis and "Danger" on the y-axis, forming a bell curve. Along the x-axis, disciplines are arranged from left to right: Mad Humanities,

The comic shows two panels set in a forest. In the first panel, a small woodland creature (possibly a squirrel or mouse) addresses a tree: "Dear Tree, a Chicago man deals land and stocks and says I ea

This comic depicts a group of cosmic entities (drawn as ghostly figures floating in space) who decide to gather all the matter in the universe together into a single point. They agree that once it get

The comic shows two time travelers in their time machine. One explains that if you go back in time and give one specific guy a weird fetish, then 20 years later everybody thinks *they* have that fetis

The comic shows a woman being evaluated by two aliens. One alien critiques her appearance, saying her teeth are too big, she has weird spots, and she's not bilaterally symmetrical enough. The other al

The comic shows a grandfather in a jailbreak scenario. In the first panel, the grandfather tells his grandchildren that he doesn't understand them -- he's never spoken up or gotten angry, and never in

The comic shows two panels with a meat counter displaying sausages. In the top panel, a sign reads "USES EVERY PART OF THE PIG: $1/lb" and a customer says "Gross." In the bottom panel, the same produc

The comic has a child asking her mother why giraffes have long necks. The mother explains that when you see an outlandish feature like that, it typically has one of two causes: it could be that the tr

The comic shows a presentation about a plan to assemble megastructures of mirrored black solar panels across the Sahara Desert, using energy visible from space as a novel approach to solving climate c

This is a longer-form comic riffing on "The Shining" and modern alienation. A character (resembling Jack Torrance from The Shining) argues that modern humans aren't strange because of their alienation

Titled "How Social Science Metrics Work," the comic walks through the lifecycle of a social science measurement tool in six steps. Step 1: Someone comes up with an ad hoc test that roughly measures so

The comic shows a spider-themed superhero called "Man-Spider" (a play on Spider-Man). Man-Spider explains that he was bitten by a radioactive man, giving him the powers of a man. In the next panel, a

The comic shows a child running to his father, exclaiming: "Dad! Dad! Mom was making terrible moaning sounds in the night! What happened?" The father awkwardly improvises: "Oh, uh, that uh... she was.

This is not a standard SMBC comic strip but rather a promotional advertisement for "Bea Wolf," a children's book written by Zach Weinersmith (the creator of SMBC) and illustrated by Boulet. The image

The comic shows two baboons sitting together, one looking at a phone. The other baboon consoles it: "Ohmygod sweetie, Instagram isn't real. That's a filter. Nobody's anogenital region is that red and

The comic presents a conversation between two people where one shares escalating facts. First: "Did you know that much of household dust is dead human skin cells?" The other responds with a calm "OK."

The comic shows a progression of increasingly aggressive book titles about quantum computing displayed in a bookstore. It starts with "Quantum Computing Made Easy," then escalates to "Quantum Computin

The comic features a conversation about robots and automation. In the first panel, a character optimistically declares: "I think once we have AI doing all the work, life's going to be a lot more beaut

The comic shows a person arriving in what appears to be heaven or the afterlife, where a divine figure explains: "The basic setup is constant sexual gratification presented in such a way that you can

The comic opens with someone noting: "Lately the price of everything but commodities has been skyrocketing." Another person responds: "It sucks, right?" followed by "It's the greatest thing in history

The comic shows a person inside a cage or cell, speaking to a robot through the bars: "Hi, hello. Hello, robot? Can I have food for my family? And can we go outside? The cage is very dark." The robot

The comic shows someone wearing a VR headset being confronted by another person: "Ted! Are you in the VR suit again?" Ted responds: "Please don't look at the file, it's embarrassing." The other person

This comic shows a father reading a bedtime story to his child from a book titled "Anthropologist Fairy Tales." The story he reads aloud goes: "And so the person or group abided by cultural norms and

This comic features a modern man enthusiastically describing male beauty standards to a bewildered 19th-century gentleman (suggested by his mustache and vest). The modern man exclaims: "Huge huge hair

This comic is a four-panel strip about the irony of AI in education. In the top two panels, a bearded father tells his daughter: "Sweetie, I can't just give you the answer to that math problem." She a