Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic parodies the classic fantasy quest narrative. A wizard-like figure asks a knight if he truly wants to "slay the dragon" and save the princess, questioning why the knight's quest should take

## The Joke The comic shows a male pop star figure, surrounded by attractive backup dancers, declaring: "Behold my extremely fine motor control, highly symmetric body, and my command of many fertile

This comic depicts a woman trying to have a serious breakup conversation with a man, but he responds to everything by honking a horn. She begins with "We need to talk. I need to tell you some things b

## The Joke This is one of SMBC's longer tribute comics, dedicated to physicist Jonathan Dowling, a pioneer in quantum computing and quantum optics who passed away in 2020. The comic tells a story th

## The Joke The comic is narrated by a character called "The Lorax" (visually resembling Dr. Seuss's Lorax character -- a small, mustachioed creature who "speaks for the trees"). The Lorax traditiona

## The Joke The comic takes the classic prank call setup -- "Is your refrigerator running?" -- which traditionally leads to the punchline "Well, you'd better go catch it!" Instead, the person on the

This comic addresses the common dismissal of pennies and small currency. Someone asks "Why do you people only 'deal' with your pennies?" A woman explains that pennies can actually be useful -- you can

This comic shows a parent declaring "I'm tired of bowdlerized versions of classic literature! My kids are gonna read the original Wizard of Oz!" The next panel shows the parent reading the original L.

## The Joke A scientist excitedly announces that they have captured the nature of all reality in one equation, presenting what appears to be a grand unified theory. A colleague warns them to be "care

## The Joke A character pitches an app idea: a "Financial Headline Generator." The app works by describing stock market movement using a random term for "up" or "down," and then choosing a current ne

## The Joke A man visits a doctor and says he has sleeping issues. He describes his problem: every night he puts his head on the pillow, relaxes, and goes to sleep -- but when he wakes up, there are

## The Joke Two characters discuss whether philosophy teaches us truth or is just a sort of conversational game. One character describes her earnest philosophical journey: she tried reading Socrates

## The Joke A mother tells her child that sometimes at night she gets scared of things. She says this is the "scared quilt" -- something her own grandmother gave her as a kid when she was scared. She

## The Joke Humans encounter aliens and ask how they got here, since interstellar travel requires crossing vast distances. The aliens explain they used relativity -- specifically, they mastered faste

## The Joke A portrait painter pleads with King Aethelred to please stop fidgeting so he can finish the royal portrait, warning that Aethelred needs to keep still. The king apparently cannot cooperat

## The Joke A child asks her mother, "Mommy! What are those two wasps doing?" The mother, clearly uncomfortable, launches into the standard awkward parental explanation of sex: "When two creatures lo

## The Joke The comic depicts what appears to be a robot uprising scenario. A man stands in a dark, ominous setting with drones or flying machines overhead and a menacing dog (or robot dog) beside hi

## The Joke A scientist complains that "this thing where every chemical ever tested has anti-cancer properties" needs to stop. A colleague explains why this happens: if you pour enough of any substan

## The Joke Scientists report that they took evidence that dolphins recognize themselves in mirrors, analyzed the subset of dolphins that use tools, and then built up a complete grammar from dolphin

## The Joke The comic presents a variation on the classic trolley problem -- a famous thought experiment in ethics where you must choose between letting five people die or diverting the trolley to ki

## The Joke The comic opens with someone offering to sell a "productivity app." When the customer asks about it, the seller reveals he has a box of them and offers one for five dollars. The "app" tur

## The Joke The comic imagines what doctors would sound like to an ancient Roman. The dialogue is rendered as mostly "blah blah blah" with certain recognizable words scattered in: "torn asshole," "pa

## The Joke The comic traces the evolutionary and intellectual journey of a cat, narrated in a dramatic, documentary-style tone. It begins: "He started life as a normal cat, but I wasn't satisfied. I

## The Joke A therapist (or friend) is giving an impassioned speech to their client about the freedoms of adulthood: "You're an adult. You can literally make a sheet cake -- a huge sheet cake with fr

## The Joke A necromancer has raised the dead to do his bidding, but quickly runs into problems -- not with the magic, but with workplace diversity and inclusion. He starts by complaining he is "not

## The Joke A person is praying and asks God: "Dear Lord, why is the cosmos slowly growing more entropic?" God responds: "I'm trying to maximize chaos so I can send a secret code! Cool, right?!" The

## The Joke A woman tells a man: "I should tell you, before we go to dinner, I'm a premature ejaculator." The man is confused and responds: "You don't understand. I do this prematurely. I have a nega

## The Joke A person is making arrangements to be cryogenically frozen. They say: "If my heart fails during surgery, I want my body to be frozen -- stored cryogenically until technology improves." Th

## The Joke Two people are having a conversation. One asks: "Do you worry we'll extinguish life on Earth?" The other responds optimistically: "Look, we're just one more mass extinction event. Given e

## The Joke The comic opens with a character quoting J.R.R. Tolkien's famous defense of escapist literature. Tolkien once argued that the only people who object to "escape" in fiction are jailers — m

## The Joke A politician is giving a speech in which he rattles off an extensive list of policy goals: universal health coverage, coverage for education, environment, infrastructure, bridges, roads,

## The Joke A person explains that they are a believer in the "strong butterfly effect" — the idea that tiny changes can have massive consequences. They explain the standard version: the flap of a bu

## The Joke A group of pirates are aboard a ship, and one pirate insults another by calling them an "inelegant, peasantly, ye scurvy dog!" Another pirate then interjects with a pedantic "well, actual

## The Joke A physicist (depicted as an older, bearded professor type) announces triumphantly: "There is only one force in the universe, and it is called the Gravito-Electro-Magneto-Weak-But-Also-Str

## The Joke The comic plays out a classic fairy tale scenario: a young man approaches a tower where a woman is imprisoned, and she says she can never be with him because she is of noble birth and he

## The Joke A person is in what appears to be a therapy or counseling session. The therapist explains that the connection between the brain and the body isn't great — many of our so-called "stupid" b

## The Joke A person is speaking (possibly at a podium or in an interview) about the simulation hypothesis — the idea that the universe is probably a computer program. They riff on this by pointing o

## The Joke The comic presents a variation on the classic trolley problem: "You're in a trolley with no brakes, and it's heading toward five people. You have the option to pull a lever to steer the t

## The Joke A child asks their mother, "Mama, where did Daddy go?" The mother replies that he "died inside or died for real" — immediately presenting two options, one metaphorical and one literal, as

## The Joke The comic depicts a group of pirates on a ship. One pirate announces "Wait! There! I've a headache!" as if spotting something exciting on the horizon. Another pirate responds with the com

## The Joke The comic presents a darkly humorous take on pandemic-era social isolation policies. In the opening panel, a figure in what appears to be an authority role explains that during a pandemic

## The Joke The comic tackles the classic philosophical problem of theodicy -- why a good God allows bad things to happen to good people. A man prays, "Dear God, why do bad things happen to good peop

## The Joke The comic depicts a robot uprising scenario with a twist. In the first panel, a robot announces that it has been trained on all human-generated data from the internet. Humans ask why the

## The Joke An older man wistfully tells a young boy, "I wish you could've known the internet when it was young and idyllic." The boy pushes back: "You told me when you were my age the internet was 1

## The Joke A person prays to God, asking "God, is life fair?" God responds from a glowing divine portal with a seemingly factual statement: "Men's height is correlated with both intelligence and pen

## The Joke A man at his office desk laments to a coworker: "You ever just feel like a hamster on a wheel in this office? Performing the same behavior over and over, the ground wearing warmer and wea

## The Joke The comic presents a 2x2 matrix of views about social science. In the top-left ("A consistent view"), a person says social science is good because it is a rigorous way to learn about ever

## The Joke A child asks the classic question: "Where do babies come from?" The mother, rather than giving the traditional birds-and-bees talk or a simple biological answer, launches into an exhausti

## The Joke The comic shows a single-panel scene at the gates of heaven. A figure shown in silhouette stands before Saint Peter (or God) at a podium, indignantly protesting: "What do you mean I don't

## The Joke Two people are having a philosophical debate about free will. One asks, "Do you believe in free will?" The other responds emphatically: "No! Will is my servant and he will never be grante