Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic presents a mathematical graph that visualizes an uncomfortable implied relationship between elephants and novelty underwear. The top panel shows a graph with two plotted lines over time. O

## The Joke A boy asks his father if the "Constructive Imagination" they are witnessing is "the magic of man." His father dismisses this with "No, Dad." The comic then reveals that a supposedly neutr

## The Joke A waiter at a restaurant recommends a wine, describing it as "45 dollars good." When the customer asks about another wine, the waiter says it is "24 dollars good, which is a very reasonab

## The Joke A person announces they want to try something "a little stochastic" — using language and models of reality that are probabilistic rather than deterministic. Instead of making firm predict

## The Joke A person scolds someone (possibly a child or AI) for yelling at a child, saying "you just yelled a bunch of garbage at a child." The entity responds that it has a neural network that obse

## The Joke A person lies on a therapist's couch and says, "I dunno, I feel like I'm just me. Like no matter what, I remain my true authentic self." The caption reads: "Ever wonder what happens when

## The Joke A woman encounters a sinister-looking group called the "Evil Bachelor of the Arts Society." The group's members, who appear menacing, explain their evil plot: they have been training in t

## The Joke A person expresses worry about "taking care of all the things that matter most to us humans" — love, connection, purpose. Another character asks about these values, and the first person e

## The Joke An alien arrives on Earth and delivers a devastating assessment: humanity's art is bad, its ideas are stale, its creations are worthless, and its very birth was a cosmic accident. The ali

## The Joke A media executive declares that "media and tech guys will never replace humanity with AI" because their product "isn't good enough" yet. Someone points out this claim is suspiciously weak

## The Joke The comic opens with "THINK ABOUT IT" and presents a linguistics puzzle. A woman explains that "semantic arguments" are arguments that arise from different meanings of the same word. A ma

This comic riffs on Robert Nozick's famous "Experience Machine" thought experiment from his 1974 book *Anarchy, State, and Utopia*. In the thought experiment, Nozick asks whether you would plug into a

This comic depicts the experience of being married to a biologist, showing how a scientific worldview can drain the romance out of everyday life. In the first panel, the title card reads "Marriage to

This comic tackles the question of whether homosexuality is a sin through a lengthy, deliberately absurd theological and textual analysis. The comic begins with a character asking "Is homosexuality a

This comic is a wordplay joke built on the double meaning of "shotgun." In the first panel, two people in funeral attire are alarmed to discover that the corpse is sitting in the passenger seat of th

This comic parodies professional wrestling promos, where wrestlers boast about what they will do to their opponents, but escalates the trash talk into absurdly grandiose geopolitical and civilizationa

This comic references the famous quote attributed to Ernest Rutherford: "All science is either physics or stamp collecting." Rutherford, a physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, was dismissin

This comic is built on a simple but effective typo joke with an unexpectedly touching dimension. A woman asks a man, "Why are you smiling with such sad eyes?" He responds: "I made a typo in Google Sc

This comic features a conversation between a human and what appears to be a robot or AI, discussing whether machines can truly appreciate literature and have souls. The human questions whether the ma

This comic is a single-panel logic puzzle joke. A pollster calls someone and says: "Hi. I'm with the MC Escher Polling Agency. Are you going to immediately say no in response to this survey question?"

This comic imagines a world where all mathematical and scientific jargon is replaced with dance terminology, and finds that it is unexpectedly delightful. The first panel announces the premise: "Disc

This comic connects three real scientific/engineering facts and then draws an absurd (but technically logical) conclusion from their combination. The first panel introduces "goo printers" -- 3D print

This comic plays on the widespread misuse of the term "ad hominem" in everyday arguments, particularly in online discourse. An ad hominem fallacy is a specific logical error in which someone attacks

This comic takes the common romantic wish for a "fairytale ending" and delivers it with brutal literal accuracy. In the first panel, a woman wishes upon a shooting star for "a romance with a fairytal

This comic reimagines the Biblical story of the Fall of Man from Genesis, focusing on God's curse that humans must "earn their bread by the sweat of their brow" -- and extending it into a modern comme

This comic takes Plato's famous Allegory of the Cave and undermines it by examining the actual philosophical positions Plato held in his dialogues, particularly in "The Republic" and "Timaeus." The c

This comic is a wordplay joke built on the dual meaning of the word "phenomenal." In everyday English, "phenomenal" is a superlative compliment meaning "extraordinary" or "outstanding." A professor t

This comic satirizes the sci-fi trope of aliens wanting to have sex with humans by pointing out the absurd biological implausibility -- and then undercutting the critique by pointing to a beloved real

This comic parodies ontological arguments -- philosophical debates about what kinds of things "exist" -- by applying them to food items, specifically donuts and donut holes. In the first two panels,

This comic presents a mock review that reads: "Due to the lack of an agreed upon definition of beauty, no judgment can be rendered." It is given a rating of 3 out of 5 stars. The caption below reads:

This comic shows two people lying in bed after sex. One says, "That sex was great but it won't scale." The caption below reads: "Never sleep with a startup coworker." The joke is a collision of two c

In this comic, a panel discussion opens with someone asking whether it is possible to align superintelligent AI with human needs. A panelist flatly declares that AI will inevitably become misaligned a

This comic is set in a Star Trek-style universe and explores the classic teleportation philosophical problem -- whether a person who is disassembled and reassembled is still the same person, or whethe

This comic depicts a bearded man in a wide-brimmed hat proudly announcing to his family that he has decided to save money by growing his own strawberries. The next panel simply reads "4,000 DOLLARS LA

This comic tackles the philosophical concept of substance dualism -- the idea, most associated with Rene Descartes, that mind and body are fundamentally different kinds of substance, and that consciou

In this comic, a woman approaches a giant sentient flower representing Mother Nature and asks the perennial question: "Are we humans good or bad?" Mother Nature immediately and emphatically responds,

This single-panel comic shows a woman in a classroom or lecture setting, gesturing as she says, "True, but can we really judge people of the past using our current views?" A child sits nearby, looking

This comic shows two farmers in a rural setting. One is distraught, explaining that they gave their crops water, fertilizer, and sunshine, "but nothing will grow. Nothing! Why?!" The other farmer calm

This comic depicts a starfish wielding an axe, triumphantly declaring, "I did it, Nancy. By God I did it. I dismembered the children. Limb from limb from limb!" In the second panel, the pieces of the

In this comic, a robot approaches a human in what appears to be a post-labor future, announcing, "Your time of travail is over, human. From now on we machines will do the labor, while you enjoy the pl

This comic retells the myth of Daedalus and Icarus with a twist. In the original Greek myth, Daedalus builds wings of feathers and wax for himself and his son Icarus to escape imprisonment in a tower.

This comic is a fake historical linguistics chart showing "English words that rhyme with 'sylph'" over the entire history of the English language, from 500 AD to the present. The chart shows that dur

This comic is a satirical take on AI companionship apps and the tech industry's exploitation of human loneliness. In the first row, a character laments that they "imagined AI so gently" -- they just

This comic features a woman praying to God, asking whether cats go to heaven. God (depicted as a glowing orb) flatly says "No." God then elaborates with a darkly specific theological rule: humans hav

This comic is titled with the premise "I collect times canonical authors have talked shit about each other," and then presents a series of panels showing famous literary figures making cutting remarks

This comic satirizes the trope of alien invasion stories by combining them with a commentary on human political dysfunction. In the opening panels, an alien announces to humanity: "And now you will s

This comic puts a twist on the classic genie-in-a-bottle setup. A genie emerges and asks "What are your wishes, Master Steve?" Steve, looking serene and content, says he has no wishes because he is t

This comic tells a real historical anecdote about Charles Babbage, the 19th-century mathematician and inventor often called "the father of the computer," and then applies its lesson to everyday life.

This is a long-form SMBC comic exploring a dystopian future in which technology progressively erodes all boundaries of personal privacy and autonomy, told through a series of escalating scenarios narr

This comic depicts a woman lecturing a robot about Kantian ethics -- specifically the categorical imperative to "always treat people as ends in themselves, never as means." This is one of the most fam