Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

## The Joke A person is standing in front of a large dinosaur skull fossil and complaining: "All these fossils! Put here to fool us into believing evolution and denying the LORD!" This is a reference

## The Joke A woman stands at an official podium and announces: "After consultation with the UN, NASA, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in view of the most recent similar calamity, we have resolved tha

## The Joke A woman is shopping for clothing and tells the store clerk: "Hi, I really like this shirt, but do you have it in men's?" The clerk responds with a confused "Men's?" The woman clarifies: "

## The Joke A genie emerges from a lamp and introduces himself: "I am the Stoic Genie, and give you the ability to accept anything you wish for." A person responds: "I wish I were beloved by women."

## The Joke A child excitedly tells their parent to turn on the news because "the missiles are inbound" and they have only four minutes to nuclear armageddon. The parent responds with resigned noncha

## The Joke A woman named Sally is asked by her partner if she ever feels like none of what they do matters. Her partner responds with an impassioned, motivational speech: "All of it matters! This pl

## The Joke God is confronted by a group of identical-looking people who demand to know if all humans are unique snowflakes with individual souls. God nervously admits that there were actually only t

## The Joke A character explains that "autological" words are words that describe themselves (for example, "short" is a short word, "English" is an English word). Another character dismisses this as

## The Joke A character argues that eugenics is bad but that humans have been doing selective breeding with cattle for hundreds of years, making them "better and better" — so in that sense, cattle ar

## The Joke A wife tells her husband to come to bed, but he insists he can't because he has to argue with "an internet guy about historical economics." She points out that he doesn't know anything ab

## The Joke Moses comes down from the mountain announcing that God has sent ten commandments. The gathered people immediately notice glaring omissions: nothing about consent, no rules against slavery

## The Joke The comic shows a group of serious-looking officials sitting around a conference table. The caption reads "Shortly after first contact with aliens." Rather than discussing the monumental

## The Joke The comic presents a table titled "If you could see your brain's world-modeling system, it would be incredibly embarrassing." It lists various theories your brain secretly entertains alon

## The Joke A character shares the statistic that a huge fraction of people think one-third is smaller than one-fourth. Another character reacts with dismay, calling it depressing, but then a third c

## The Joke Someone praises another person for being a "genius" who has "finally found a way to rebel against the big merchants." The supposed rebel explains their method: listening to rock music and

## The Joke The comic shows three tiers of how people are treated based on their skill at sports. When you're bad at sports, your teammates offer encouraging words like "great hustle, we might make t

## The Joke A person proudly presents a device that can "compute things about minds everywhere" -- it has the ability to compute subjective experience, so if you give it any brain configuration it ca

## The Joke The comic contrasts how people react to predictions about sports versus predictions about elections. In the top half, labeled "When people talk about sports predictions," someone says "I'

## The Joke A person writes in to "Dear God" saying they have been reading the Westminster Shorter Catechism and have questions. They acknowledge the questions may seem harsh, but note they were "mad

## The Joke The comic depicts what appears to be a schoolyard bully hitting another kid while delivering a philosophical monologue instead of the usual taunts. Rather than saying something like "Give

## The Joke A child asks their parent: "Mom, how is it possible that yellow and blue make green?" The mother explains that blue paint is dye/pigment that absorbs every color except blue, and yellow a

## The Joke The comic presents four panels showing the evolution of finger guns. "Finger-guns: Primeval" shows a person doing the classic casual finger-gun gesture with a "CHK! CHK!" sound. "Finger-g

## The Joke A father tells his son: "Son, I want to give you this," and hands him a book titled "What Women Want." The son is taken aback, but the father clarifies: "Dad, come on. Women aren't a mono

## The Joke Two people are discussing mathematics. One mentions Buffon's proof and asks why it is considered beautiful. The other responds that it is "elegant." When pressed on why, they explain: "Pr

## The Joke A person is enthusiastically telling the story of Georg Cantor, saying: "And once Georg Cantor glimpsed beyond infinity, glimpsed beyond all our abilities to conceive, he went mad." Anoth

## The Joke A woman says to a robot: "I feel like you think of me as a piece of meat." The robot responds with perfect literalism: "You are meat. Meat that I love. Also bones and cartilage. That I al

## The Joke A job interviewer asks the classic question, "Where do you see yourself in five years?" The candidate takes the question with rigorous, almost actuarial seriousness: she says she logicall

## The Joke A person dismissively tells a scientist, "You experimentalists are nothing! You're just a bunch of stamp collectors!" The scientist, offended, asks, "What do theorists do that's so great?

## The Joke The comic opens with the Latin phrase "Panem et Circenses" ("Bread and Circuses") and a man asking "What?" His companion explains it is an old Roman political concept describing how polit

## The Joke A couple in bed discusses reincarnation. One asks, "Do you believe in reincarnation?" The other says no. When pressed on whether it could be supernatural, the skeptic systematically disma

## The Joke This comic is a self-referential graph joke. The X-axis is labeled "Percent of Graph Viewed" (from 0% to 100%), and the Y-axis is labeled "Your Belief That There Really Is Nothing More To

## The Joke A human speaker stands at a podium addressing an audience, making a grand declaration about human uniqueness: that unlike other animals, humans have complex language, can pass information

This comic, titled "Know Your Computers," is a parody of educational classification charts. It categorizes four types of computers in humorous ways. The "Quantum Computer" is described as a computer t

## The Joke The comic quotes the opening lines of W.B. Yeats' famous poem "The Second Coming" (1919): "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall ap

This comic satirizes the slippery slope arguments commonly used in TV news commentary. A news commentator states that "all TV news commentary should begin by stating underlying assumptions," then proc

## The Joke The comic opens with a narrator addressing God, complaining that "the arrow of time points in only one direction." This sets up a premise rooted in physics -- the thermodynamic arrow of t

This comic plays on the trope of a "Freaky Friday" body-swap scenario applied to a college professor. A student tells the professor they would do "anything" for a good grade, implying a sexual proposi

This comic shows two bomb squad technicians in protective gear working to defuse a bomb. One explains the standard movie trope setup: "If you cut the red wire, instant death. If you cut the blue wire,

This comic is a riff on "an economist walks into a bar" jokes, poking fun at how economic models rely on simplifying assumptions that diverge from reality. An economist walks into a bar and asks for a

This comic tackles the classic philosophical problem of teleportation and personal identity. A character asks whether the teleporter actually kills you, and the operator initially confirms "you techni

This comic plays on CAPTCHA verification tests -- the "prove you are human" challenges websites use to distinguish humans from bots. A computer screen asks a person to prove they are human by counting

## The Joke The comic presents the header text: "Sometimes when the meaning of a word changes, books get way better." Below this, a group of people -- depicted in colorful, modern clothing and appear

This comic presents a graph titled "The Single-Factor Case for Optimism." The Y-axis measures "the ratio of spankings that are for corporal punishment to spankings that are a weird sex thing," and the

This comic features aliens visiting humans with increasingly impressive technological gifts. The aliens first offer a chip that grants furniture consciousness, which the humans react to with horror ("

## The Joke The comic shows what appears to be a biblical scene: a group of ancient, bearded figures stand before a large tablet or screen displaying a list of divine commandments. However, the comma

## The Joke A child has written a satire about their dad. The dad reads it and says he thinks the child will find that the dad changed his life to be a better person in response to the satire, showin

## The Joke A scientist proudly announces that they have proven the universe can be described using a single, simple computer model, suggesting a grand unified understanding of reality. When asked ho

## The Joke The comic depicts two groups of elemental beings -- rock men and ice men -- each shouting that their kind is "best." This escalates into a massive, destructive battle between the two fact

## The Joke The comic presents a character delivering a mock-academic argument based on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which proposes that the structure of a language affects its speakers' worldview and

## The Joke A writer addresses their "Muse" (the personification of artistic inspiration) asking why they have not written anything great lately. The Muse responds with an extended metaphor about how