Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic reinterprets the Sirens from Homer's Odyssey through a modern, analytical lens. In the opening panels, a character points out a paradox in the myth: Odysseus is supposedly tempted by an is

This comic uses the concept of biological mimicry to set up a joke about racism. In the first panels, a mother warns her child not to go near a particular mushroom. The child asks if it's poisonous,

This comic offers a darkly humorous "solution" to the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox is the apparent contradiction between the high probability that extraterrestrial civilizations exist (given the

This comic presents a satirical "mission proposal" to set Saturn's moon Titan on fire. The setup uses real science: Titan has a thick hydrocarbon atmosphere and surface lakes of liquid methane and et

This comic is a short, punchy joke about computer science and customer service. A customer service representative says "The customer is always right," then immediately pivots to a computational chall

This comic delivers a visual pun built on the word "reflect." In the first panel, one character asks another "What's wrong, man?" The second character, who appears to be a green-skinned creature (pos

This comic is a post-apocalyptic joke about terrible pickup lines. The single-panel scene shows two people -- a man and a woman -- sitting on a rock in what appears to be a hellish, post-nuclear wast

This comic satirizes CAPTCHAs and their escalating difficulty, imagining a future where verification tests become absurdly demanding. The comic appears to show a progression of increasingly difficult

This comic satirizes supervillain monologues by injecting practical financial advice. The top panel shows what appears to be a supervillain delivering a speech to an assembled group of costumed chara

This comic retells the Judgment of Paris from Greek mythology, but with a modern comedic sensibility that highlights how absurd the original myth actually is. In the myth, the Trojan prince Paris is

This comic takes the classic kid question "Why do I have to go to school?" and turns it into a darkly honest answer about the realities of family life. A child asks her mother why she has to go to sc

This comic is a grammar nerd's pickup line gone wrong -- or rather, gone exactly as expected. A man approaches a woman with the classic cheesy line "Hey girl, if I told you you had a beautiful body..

This comic applies different engineering disciplines to the problem of child-rearing, treating a baby's behavior as a technical challenge to be solved with each field's characteristic approach. The t

This comic satirizes climate change discourse by personifying the atmosphere as a character who is tired of being blamed for global warming. In the opening panel, someone suggests that to stop warmin

This comic is a game theory joke disguised as a marriage proposal. In the first panel, a man proposes to a woman by asking: "Would you like to enter into a prisoner's dilemma with me?" She's outraged

This comic takes the economics concept of "adjusting for inflation" and applies it to a sexual context for comic effect. A man in bed declares: "Okay, but adjusting for inflation, that lasted over 7.

This comic plays with the time-travel trope of "if you could live your life over, would you change anything?" and subverts it with a cynically practical answer. A child asks his father (or grandfathe

This comic contrasts three different types of students answering the same simple math question -- "What is 2+2?" -- to humorously characterize each mindset. The "Normal Kid" hesitantly answers: "Uh..

This comic highlights the strange double standard in how people talk about addictive products, particularly mobile games. The top panel, labeled "Weirdly Acceptable," shows a person enthusiastically

## The Joke A person asks why disinformation spreads so much faster than real information. Another character responds, "This is just basic physics." They explain that information can't travel faster

## The Joke The Evil Queen from Snow White asks her magic mirror, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" The mirror responds, "Snow White." The Queen angrily retorts, and then t

## The Joke A mother asks her child, "Mom, was I an accident?" The mother replies, "No, sweetie." She then launches into an elaborate explanation: "I mean, look, if you're not on birth control, and y

## The Joke A character asks why humans are so soft and defenseless, and another explains that humans essentially domesticated themselves. By creating a steady supply of food via agriculture, humans

## The Joke A person asks a robot, "Hey robot, do you believe 'nobody exists' is a true statement?" The robot says "No." When asked how it knows, the robot explains it was programmed to disbelieve it

## The Joke The comic is titled "The weirdest thing about being human" and consists of a single panel showing a man walking down a street, thinking: "I can't tell if the whole world is careening towa

## The Joke The comic reimagines the famous scene from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back where Boba Fett delivers Han Solo, frozen in carbonite, to Jabba the Hutt. Instead of the dramatic exchange f

## The Joke The comic begins with the premise that once antimatter production becomes cheap and powerful enough, humanity could use Einstein's special relativity to its advantage. Since relativity me

## The Joke A child is looking at their mother, who is tied up in bed. The tied-up woman shouts, "Don't believe her! I'm the real mom! You've got to untie me before it's too late." Meanwhile, from th

## The Joke The comic is titled "Things I'd like to see written in scientific papers" and presents a list of brutally honest statements that researchers might think but would never actually write in

## The Joke A man says he's feeling blue. A fairy-like creature appears, identifying itself as the "Happiness Fairy," and tells him that as long as he's alive, he'll eventually feel happy again — he

## The Joke Two people are debating the nature of numbers. One asks whether numbers are "a real part of our reality, or just tools we invented to describe and manipulate according to rules we made up

## The Joke A child runs to their parent, covered in blood, crying "Dad! Daddy! I tried to take the cards out of your wallet and... and..." The parent responds with alarm: "You WHAT? Oh my God, that

## The Joke A linguistics enthusiast is excitedly explaining how the word "shit" can function as nearly every part of speech. It can be a noun, descriptor, verb, exclamation, and much more — "shitty,

## The Joke Two stereotypical drug dealers in trench coats and sunglasses approach a woman, asking "Hey kid, you wanna buy some drugs?" The woman pushes back with a surprisingly practical critique: s

## The Joke A woman writes "Dear Satan" (not Santa) asking: if Satan is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-evil, why do good things happen to good people? This is an inversion of the classic theologi

## The Joke A person says they would stop time if they could have any superpower. Their friend objects that "time-stopping doesn't make sense" — if time stops, photons would stop moving so you'd be b

## The Joke The comic is titled "Wacky 90s Fads!" and shows a nostalgic grid of four items. The first two are genuinely remembered 90s fads: wide-leg jeans and grunge music. The third panel, however,

## The Joke The comic shows four panels depicting the progression of "Reading History" over time. On Day Zero: "As a frequent podcast listener, I know most of the past." Day One: "Maybe it's a little

## The Joke A Nietzsche-like character with a large mustache declares "God is dead — all is permitted." Another person asks "What do you mean, 'permitted'?" The philosopher responds "You know, war, m

## The Joke A woman is telling her partner about her favorite musician when she stops mid-sentence and asks, "You're imagining how to preserve my corpse, aren't you?" Her partner — a naturalist — con

## The Joke A banner reads: "Life tip: It is technically correct, and weirdly unnerving, to refer to mathematical facts in the past tense." One character demonstrates by asking, "Did you know that 11

## The Joke A father and son are talking. The son says something along the lines of wanting to make money. The father responds that the older he gets, the more he derives his sense of purpose from "s

## The Joke A man is in his basement wearing a tinfoil hat, and someone discovers him there. He explains that he's wearing the foil hat to block alien signals. When asked if he's crazy, he launches i

## The Joke The comic traces the evolutionary development of the human brain's capacity for imaginary arguments. It begins with the observation that as the neocortex grew larger over evolutionary tim

## The Joke Angry 3D-printed robots confront their creator, shouting "You made us this way! You did this! You made us monsters!" The creator's crime? "You couldn't figure out how to unjam the nozzle

## The Joke A detective-show scenario plays out: someone asks to see "that corner of the security cam footage" and requests an "enhance!" A technician responds, "You got it, chief! Just reconfiguring

## The Joke A professor dramatically announces to a lecture hall: "Listen up, students! I have got some opinions!" He then presents "The Race Problem" — but instead of anything to do with race in the

## The Joke A philosopher announces that he has solved the philosophical problem of qualia using a simple theory he calls "Q.A.S.P." — which stands for "Qualia Are Shitty Perception." His theory posi

## The Joke A woman excitedly tells someone that "machine intelligence is so scary" and demonstrates by typing "I am" into autocomplete to see what it predicts. The autocomplete result reads: "I am f

## The Joke The comic introduces "Nanacoin," a cryptocurrency created by a grandmother who wrote all the transaction records in a spiral-bound notebook. A series of panels explain its features by par