Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

## The Joke A man prays: "Dear God, is this the best of all possible worlds?" God responds: "Definitely! It's great! Everyone gets a soul, gets to watch the Earth show..." The man clarifies: "I mean

## The Joke A woman exclaims "Oh my God! Sheila!" upon encountering someone. Another person explains their scheme: "I've created a neural network that finds attractive, recently-single people looking

## The Joke A man at what appears to be a bar or party tries a pickup line on a woman: "Hey girl, did you know that songbirds don't have penises?" She responds: "That's the worst pickup line I've eve

## The Joke A singer is performing what sounds like a love song, but the lyrics are expressed entirely in the language of optimal stopping theory and mathematical optimization. Instead of saying "you

## The Joke A man arrives at the Pearly Gates and excitedly announces his location. St. Peter, standing at his traditional podium, responds with an ominous revelation: "We have your browser history."

## The Joke A man announces he has discovered a way to "instantly achieve grandness" -- simply use the word "we" instead of "I" in all situations. The examples demonstrate how this substitution trans

## The Joke A woman asks a man whether he thinks "true knowledge is intrinsically good." He enthusiastically agrees, saying that is "the most beautiful idea in science." The woman then builds on this

## The Joke The comic begins with a tech company announcement: thanks to artificial intelligence, people around the world can now communicate regardless of what language they speak. However, the pres

## The Joke A human asks a robot, "Do you think robots can be creative?" The robot says "No, never," but then offers a devastatingly precise definition: "'Creativity' is a word humans use to refer to

## The Joke A woman angrily tells a man, "That's it! You are sleeping on the couch tonight!" The man looks dejected in the second panel. In the third panel, she adds the real punishment: "And no phon

## The Joke The comic is a riff on the classic "Monkey's Paw" story. A man holds a monkey's paw and makes wishes, but each wish is granted with an ironic twist. He calls the paw "uncreative" after it

## The Joke A woman runs up to firefighters screaming "My house is on fire!" The firefighters initially seem helpful, but one of them starts nerding out with irrelevant scientific tangents instead of

## The Joke The comic shows a CAPTCHA test -- the familiar "Prove you are not a robot. Select all the stoplights" challenge that websites use to distinguish humans from bots. In the first panel, we s

## The Joke The comic presents a fake academic-style table titled "Proposed Number Improvements," suggesting changes to fundamental mathematical constants to make equations look nicer. The proposals

## The Joke A human has been abducted by aliens and nervously asks, "Aliens! Oh no! Are you going to probe my anus?" The aliens confirm: "Yes." The human asks what comes after that, and the aliens sa

## The Joke Someone asks God whether heaven is real. God confirms it is, but then describes the enormous complexity of actually designing a paradise. First, you have to figure out what paradise even

## The Joke A bearded man warns his partner before they go to bed that everything he has learned about sex came from a video he saw on the internet. His partner responds graciously, saying "Ah, wow.

## The Joke A scientist or researcher is presenting findings, explaining that they can predict with high confidence that in the year 1951, a single transistor was large enough to cover the entire glo

## The Joke A man lies in bed unable to sleep, praying to God: "Dear God, I can't sleep. I keep wondering... how come I'm poor, alone, weak, confused, and tired all the time?" God responds from a spe

## The Joke A woman with glasses announces to a red-haired woman: "Before I go, I intend to put this chastity belt on you." The red-haired woman asks "What?" and the first woman clarifies: "Silly wom

## The Joke A graduation speaker addresses graduates with what starts as the classic commencement speech cliche: "Congrats, graduates. But now it's time for the real world." He then proceeds to list

## The Joke A red-haired woman confidently states to a robot: "Robots may be smart, but they cannot wonder." The robot asks "Why not?" The woman, caught off guard, fumbles her response: "What? I dunn

## The Joke A supervillain (wearing a cape and mask) triumphantly declares: "Hahaha! I've done it! I've managed to disguise as a politician! Now I can do evil without consequence!" A bald character (

## The Joke The comic presents a self-help pitch: "Improve your life by believing in the Simulation Hypothesis." The idea is framed as a motivational technique. A man in a suit explains the supposed

## The Joke A scientist enthusiastically announces a breakthrough: "Using the latest methods in deep learning, we have solved the most fundamental problem in biology -- the protein folding problem!"

## The Joke Two men are at a bar, and one advises the other: "Dude, just ask her out. The worst thing she can do to you is say no." This is the classic pep talk given to someone who is nervous about

## The Joke A man tells a woman he wouldn't want to live forever because "you'd get bored." She dismisses this as stupid, and then launches into a detailed rebuttal. She points out that in the last d

## The Joke Two men are having a debate about intelligent design versus evolution. The first man says he doesn't understand how someone can look at nature and not see "the hand of the creator." The s

## The Joke A child asks a parent, "Dad, how come adults are all crazy?" The parent responds simply, "Because they had parents." The comic then explains that this is well-studied: the craziness peaks

## The Joke A child approaches their father saying, "Mom, Dad, I want to show you this video of the kitchen last night." The child has apparently set up surveillance in the kitchen and captured foota

## The Joke The comic opens with a character making the philosophical claim that "consciousness is just a system observing itself." Another character responds indignantly, "How dare you!" The first c

## The Joke A person is at what appears to be a graveside or memorial, pouring out a drink and saying, "I'm pouring this one out for you, Sally." The ghost of Sally appears behind them, looking annoy

## The Joke A child is running a lemonade stand, selling lemonade for 25 cents a cup. The child's parent proudly says, "My parents think I'm learning to be an entrepreneur, so they're fronting the pr

## The Joke A father is tucking his son into bed and delivering a piece of moral wisdom: "Son, the most important thing in life is that you must always treat people as an end in themselves, never a m

## The Joke Two bugs (likely meant to be insects such as praying mantises or spiders, given the context) are lying together after mating. One says to the other, "I hope it's okay with you, I'd like t

## The Joke A woman says, "I hear you like dangerous men." A man responds, "Maybe I do." She then describes the kind of danger she represents: "Sometimes I walk around the house in socks on a hardwoo

## The Joke A man confides to another person that he feels like he was "born in the wrong era." This is a common romantic sentiment people express when they feel nostalgic for a past time period they

## The Joke The comic references the mythological Hydra, the multi-headed serpent from Greek mythology that would grow two heads whenever one was cut off. In the first panel, a narrator explains this

## The Joke A scientist announces to the President that they have made a revolutionary breakthrough in the science of human suffering: they have figured out how to end human suffering forever. When t

## The Joke The comic shows a man in bed with a woman, post-intimacy, quoting the famous line attributed to filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard: "A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not

## The Joke A man is delivering a bigoted rant about some unspecified group: "Oh, they claim to be peaceful, but they're constantly violent! They're lazy! They're stupid! They'd rather loaf around an

## The Joke A conversation unfolds about why people do not accept certain scientific or factual claims. One person asks why people will not accept something despite all the evidence. Another suggests

## The Joke A woman is working on fixing something under the kitchen sink when a man arrives and announces he has read a book about how to solve problems in relationships by listening to your partner

## The Joke The comic shows a bespectacled man (drawn in Weinersmith's typical "nerd" style) excitedly holding up a calculator and shouting "Yeah! Shake that fat tail, baby!" Below the panel, the cap

## The Joke A parent tells their teenager "You're grounded!" The teenager retorts "You can't ground me!" and then launches into a philosophical argument: "All of my misbehavior is a direct but deeply

## The Joke Two characters are lying on a hillside looking up at the clouds. One says the familiar optimistic saying, "They say every cloud has a silver lining." The other responds, "That's because o

## The Joke A politician addresses the public, declaring that the era of top-down policy is over. Instead, they propose using big data, algorithms, and A/B testing to poll all citizens in order to id

## The Joke A person prays to God, asking "Dear God, do you even like us?" God responds defensively: "How can you ask me that?" The person presses the point, asking why, if God really liked humans, H

## The Joke A person on a dock asks a scientist "What... what are you doing?" as the scientist pushes a large bomb or weapon into the ocean. The title card reads "Evolutionary Biology." The caption a

## The Joke The comic opens with someone discussing the Pioneer Probes -- real spacecraft launched by NASA in the 1970s that carried a plaque with a diagram identifying Earth's location and showing t