Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

## The Joke A man prays to God, asking how a just deity can punish finite beings with eternal damnation: "We're limited beings. We commit finite sins, and you give us infinite punishment?" God respon

## The Joke A father is sitting on the edge of his child's bed at bedtime, clearly dreading the "birds and the bees" conversation. Instead of explaining where babies come from, he proposes an alterna

## The Joke A daughter asks her father to fix her Lego robot. The father, sitting comfortably in his chair, refuses and instead delivers a lofty parenting speech about wanting her to "learn to think

## The Joke A character reflects on how becoming a science communicator changed their view of humans. They note that humans have many explicit status-seeking behaviors, and they wonder whether their

## The Joke The comic shows a Google-style email autoreply interface. At the top of the screen, there is an email (the subject line appears to reference a kids' book based on Beowulf). The auto-sugge

## The Joke The comic parodies the classic fantasy trope of "The Chosen One." A group of medieval adventurers debate among themselves about who the prophecy's chosen one really is. One bearded warrio

## The Joke A young man defiantly tells his father, "I'm not gonna be an accountant like you, Dad!" He announces he will become a musician so he does not have to work a "real job." In the third panel

## The Joke A couple is dealing with the classic parenting dilemma: their toddler has fallen asleep in the afternoon. The father notes that if they don't wake him up now, the child will be up all nig

## The Joke A man observes that he checks email constantly -- it eats up about four hours a day -- but if he batched it, it would only take 30 minutes. His friend agrees this is a good point, calling

## The Joke A boss tells an employee to clock out 30 seconds early so it does not count as overtime, adding that any extra work is "on you." The employee endures this unfair treatment, but a thought

## The Joke At a graduation ceremony, an administrator tells a student named Steve that she can "come clean" with him now: he did not actually go to real college. He was part of an experiment at a "P

## The Joke A scientist excitedly announces that thanks to computer science, dating is no longer necessary -- perfect marriages can be produced with simple algorithms. The scene then cuts to the resu

## The Joke Someone asks, "What are you doing, Doctor Chang?" The doctor replies that she is writing a book about how we should worry more about automation. A robot standing nearby then announces tha

## The Joke A group of cavemen are discussing the wolf problem: "The wolves! The wolves ate our cars!" One caveman says "No." When asked to elaborate, he explains he is "cool with them" and wants to

## The Joke A man on a date tells his companion, "You know what's truly beautiful in a romantic kindness." She responds by noting that kindness is also "the generous work of never making me question

## The Joke A man stands before a genie and is told the standard rules: "You may have any wish granted by punching this ball." However, the genie immediately adds a series of increasingly specific re

## The Joke The comic is a long-form satirical piece about celebrity divorces and how they are covered by the media. It opens with a newscaster-style announcement about a celebrity couple's divorce,

## The Joke A woman asks her friend for help with her phone. She says she needs to log in to something but it has one of those "robot-proof" CAPTCHA tests. Her friend says "Sure, let me look." Upon s

## The Joke A woman excitedly tells her friend Steve that she just won the lottery. Steve's immediate reaction is "I'm so sorry." When she protests that he should be happy for her, Steve launches int

## The Joke A startup founder gives a tour of his office, explaining the company's business model: "Our startup is called 'Their.' We were originally called 'There' but we made 'Their' a more accepta

## The Joke A man stands on the street holding a "Free Hugs" sign. A passerby confronts him with some harsh economic reasoning: "You're not considering opportunity cost. In the four hours you spend h

## The Joke A scientist announces a disturbing discovery: "I've identified your son has the Satan Gene!" The parents react with horror: "My baby!" The scientist explains that "The Satan Gene is respo

## The Joke A man talks to his own brain, personified as a floating brain character. He says: "Hey brain, I'm stressing out about this one thing." The brain responds with apparent concern: "Oh no!" I

## The Joke A woman tells her friends: "I'm worried I'm not confident enough." A friend reassures her: "I really think you're too self-doubting." She replies: "Look, we all have doubts from time to t

## The Joke A meditation instructor explains the benefits of meditation: you learn to slowly quiet your frantic inner monologue, surrender to the present moment, and leave all those negative ideas be

## The Joke A person arrives in the afterlife and asks God the big question: "Why am I here? What's the meaning of it all?" God begins to answer -- "Well, I can tell you, but how would you know wheth

## The Joke A man is proposing marriage, but instead of the traditional skywriting or banner, an enormous snake is spelling out "WILL YOU MARRY ME" with its body in the sky above them. The man is hol

## The Joke An alien has come to Earth and is frustrated that despite sending perfectly crafted political videos, violating all of humanity's most cherished taboos, people still do not agree on anyth

## The Joke An alien political advisor is addressing what appears to be an alien leader or candidate, explaining their campaign strategy problem. The advisor notes that they have sent a "perfectly-cr

## The Joke A woman is lecturing (apparently to an audience shown in silhouette) and explains: "If you give a function f to Mathematica and say 'What's the derivative of the integral?' Mathematica wi

## The Joke A woman is standing at a podium or lectern explaining a mathematical fact: "If you give a function F to Mathematica and say 'what's the derivative of the integral?' Mathematica will retur

## The Joke A researcher specializing in existential risk (threats that could end civilization or humanity) tries to communicate the urgency of their work. Nobody cares — not because people disagree,

## The Joke A child walks in on their parents in a compromising situation and asks, "Mom? Dad? What were you doing to each other?!" The father panics, thinking "Think of a lie think of a lie think of

## The Joke A human asks an alien to explain Zorblaxian reproduction. The alien obliges: a male and female combine genetic material, a baby grows in the female's body -- "pretty standard stuff." But

## The Joke Two people are having a late-night conversation in bed about utilitarianism. One person says they just don't buy utilitarianism -- that you can't reduce human morality to "totting up the

## The Joke Two characters are having a philosophical debate about utilitarianism. One character objects that utilitarianism -- the ethical framework that says we should maximize overall happiness --

## The Joke An elderly person discovers the Fountain of Youth. The guardian of the fountain asks if they would like to go back to their youth -- back to "the angry teens, the confused twenties, the a

## The Joke An old man has found the Fountain of Youth. The guardian of the fountain offers him the chance to go back to being young, listing all the things that come with youth: "the angry teens, th

## The Joke A person stands outside a door saying "Knock knock!" in the classic setup for a knock-knock joke. Inside, a woman hears the knocking but instead of responding with "Who's there?" (as the

## The Joke Someone is knocking on a door, cheerfully saying "Knock knock!" The person inside the house stares in silence ("..."), prompting the knocker to repeat "KNOCK KNOCK!" more insistently. The

## The Joke A group of people are discussing how tedious it is to say the full term "ATM Machine" (which is already redundant, since ATM stands for "Automated Teller Machine"). One person suggests sh

## The Joke A person stands at a podium, apparently giving a policy presentation, and rattles off a long, detailed, and entirely correct list of reasons why space-based weapons are impractical: laser

## The Joke Presented as "Lifehack #662607004: The Box Trick," this comic offers a four-step guide. Step 1: Take an old cardboard box. Step 2: Cut a hole in the cardboard box. Step 3: Get inside the

## The Joke A dominatrix-like figure is whipping a man, who responds enthusiastically: "Oh yes! Now tell me that I'm bad at my job!" She obliges, telling him he is bad at his job. He then escalates h

## The Joke A man enthusiastically tells his companion that he loves exploring his own mind through introspection: the more he digs, the more interesting things he discovers about himself, and most p

## The Joke A child asks how mommies are different from daddies. The first response explains that mommies are like symbiotes and daddies are like commensalistic organisms -- using biological terminol

## The Joke This is a long-form comic that tells a story about a giant sentient smiley face (or happy sphere) that appears on Earth. The narrative begins with the entity arriving and being enormously

## The Joke A scientist stands with his colleagues, lamenting: "Dammit! Nobody believed my calculations and now it's too late!" His work was apparently so far outside the mainstream that "they called

## The Joke A mother is told her polling numbers as a parent are low during "primary season." The joke plays on the double meaning of "primary" -- in politics, a primary is a preliminary election whe

## The Joke The comic opens with a classic ghost-story setup: a group of people hear whispers in the night, and someone explains that this is the site of a terrible massacre. The men of a village wer