Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

## The Joke A frog sitting on a stump asks a peasant to kiss it, promising "Kiss me and I shall become a princess!" The peasant picks up the frog and kisses it. The frog transforms in a flash of ligh

## The Joke The comic is titled "Never Have Sex With a Statistician." In a dark panel (implying a bedroom scene), one person asks "What are you doing to my belly button?" The statistician partner rep

## The Joke A prince arrives at the base of Rapunzel's tower and calls up the classic line: "Rapunzel! I have come to save you! Let down your hair!" The hair comes cascading down from the impossibly

## The Joke A man panics and shouts "No! Don't look at my browser history!" as his partner sits down at his computer. She looks at the screen and exclaims "Oh sweet Jesus!!" — setting up the expectat

## The Joke The comic recounts an anecdote from G.K. Chesterton's autobiography about a friend of his grandfather whom he knew as a child. This man would carry a prayer-book every Sunday "without the

## The Joke A scientist is presenting her work on an invisibility device. She explains the highly technical mechanism behind it: a suit of miniaturized metamaterial split-ring resonators producing a

## The Joke The comic opens with a narrator explaining that people used to be literal, with a copy of a letter showing how the gentlefolk "have so many missed calories that the medical brigade can ha

## The Joke The comic is set in a science-fiction scenario where alien commanders are discussing humanity. In the first panel, an alien commander announces bad news: since they discovered that bio-or

## The Joke A father asks his son, "Hey son, would you like a dad joke?" The son says, "Go ahead, Dad..." The father then screams, "YOU'RE LOOKING AT ONE!" -- meaning he himself is the "dad joke," i.

## The Joke The comic opens with a caption: "I wish all educational texts were written like Epictetus wrote." It then shows a person reading a textbook that combines Epictetus's famously abrasive, co

## The Joke A woman gives her husband a novelty bathroom scale as a gift, explaining that "when you stand on it, it shouts insults." The husband, amused, says "Ha! Lemme try it!" He steps on, expecti

## The Joke A nostalgic older person begins with "This country was lost its way. We need to go back to the good old days when America was prosperous." Two younger people eagerly ask how to do that. T

## The Joke This comic is a promotional strip for Zach Weinersmith's book "Soonish." It features a conversation about the word "anomie." A character explains that anomie is "a distressed sense of nor

## The Joke A man approaches a woman (implied to be a sex worker) and asks, "How much is it?" She replies, "Sex is free with in-sex purchases." In the next panel, now in a bedroom, the confused man s

## The Joke A man tells a woman, "I feel like we don't communicate well." She agrees, saying, "Yes, me more silme more sall." In an attempt to fix the problem, she announces she will be "borrowing a

## The Joke A woman complains, "God, why is quantum mechanics so weird?" God appears and explains that it is His fault. He says that to make a rainbow, He had to break light into wavelengths using di

## The Joke A father sits down with his son to have a serious talk about love. He begins with the analogy "Love is like a game of chess," which sounds like it is building toward a profound life lesso

## The Joke A father is explaining Santa Claus to his children. He says, "Santa only gives gifts to kids who aren't naughty, but he has such low, such 'subterranean' standards that nobody makes the c

## The Joke This is a long-form comic about "stotting" (also called "pronking"), the behavior observed in gazelles and other prey animals where they leap high into the air when a predator approaches,

## The Joke The comic depicts Zeno of Elea, the ancient Greek philosopher famous for his paradoxes about motion, using his own philosophical arguments as an excuse to avoid doing household chores. He

## The Joke This comic is a promotional strip for the book "Soonish" by Zach and Kelly Weinersmith, presented as a parody of romantic comedy tropes. A woman tells a man named Johnny that she knows he

## The Joke A woman poses the classic Problem of Evil to God: "God, if you're all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing, how come there's evil?" Instead of addressing the question directly, God introdu

## The Joke A child asks Frosty the Snowman whether it's weird for her to drink water in front of him, since he's made of water -- making it "like drinking a slurry of you." Frosty fires back that th

## The Joke At a party, a woman says, "Thanks for having me to your party, it's nice to meet the English department." A man with glasses notices something suspicious about her speech: "I... the lengt

## The Joke A group of people are looking at a bookshelf when one exclaims, "Wow! Is that an old edition of Moby-Dick?" Another person explains, "Oh, it's not actually a copy of Moby-Dick. It's an in

## The Joke The comic presents three academic-looking figures, each proposing a different scientific hypothesis for why humans evolved larger crania (skulls/brains): the first says it was to make too

## The Joke A man complains, "I'm having trouble focusing on work today." A woman offers him a pill, saying, "Try one of these pills. They help you zero in on things." He immediately takes one. In th

## The Joke An older man angrily accuses someone of taking his pie: "You took my pie!" A younger man with long dark hair, calmly eating the pie with a fork, responds with serene philosophical authori

## The Joke God is shown creating a new family of plants, telling someone (presumably Adam or an angel) that He is making "Cucurbitaceae" -- the botanical family that includes gourds, squashes, and c

## The Joke The comic introduces a fictional mathematical concept: "Lucky Moron Sequences," defined as any convergent series such that the sum of finitely many initial terms equals the sum of the ful

## The Joke An alien is giving a tour or presentation to a human woman, explaining that Earth's history is "part of the League of Worlds" collection. When the woman asks why, the alien notes that whi

## The Joke A child asks Santa Claus why Bobby got a fire engine while she only got a lump of coal. Santa explains that he made a list of naughty and nice kids, and the child asks "What'd I do?" Sant

## The Joke A child announces that her teacher told her "every snowflake is unique." The comic then presents three different adult responses, each representing a different worldview. The first adult

## The Joke The comic is presented as a single panel addressed to "Literature students." It offers advice for the next time they have to review a book they have only skimmed: use a quote from Jorge L

## The Joke A couple is sitting on a couch, and the woman tells the man they need to break up. She explains: "I process the information from you in the time between my excitement and your predictable

## The Joke This comic is an unusually long and largely serious entry for SMBC. Rather than a traditional joke setup and punchline, it is a semi-autobiographical editorial comic in which Zach Weiners

## The Joke A father tells his child: "Okay, no more arguing about it. I'll buy you a puppy IF you can take care of this little puppy statue over night. He's made of solid metal, so it should be pret

## The Joke A child excitedly announces that at her slumber party, the kids are going to "stay up all night by drinking coffee mixed with soda, and maybe watch a movie!" An adult (likely a parent) re

## The Joke A man is enthusiastically pitching a story to a publisher or editor at a desk: "And then, by a miracle, he lasted for EIGHT DAYS!" The editor responds with immediate rejection: "No. No. I

## The Joke The comic takes several classic nursery rhymes and reimagines them through a modern, literal, or cynical lens. The first panel shows "Baa Baa Black Sheep" being questioned: "Have you any

## The Joke The comic is titled "Modern Politics Is Weird." A man sits in front of his TV, which announces: "Scandal today as a candidate unhinged his jaw and slowly enveloped a screaming child." The

## The Joke The comic features a conversation between a human and a robot about consciousness and AI. The human asks whether a collection of wires and switches could possibly experience true consciou

## The Joke Two people are having a conversation. One asks: "Do you think viruses are truly alive?" The other responds: "Nah. They're just barely getting by." The first person says "Huh?" -- confused

## The Joke A student sits in a lecture about "econophysics." The professor explains that he is new to the field but knows two things: "economics is too slow and the math is too simple." He then lays

## The Joke A couple is having a conversation. One asks, "Do you think we're in love or just infatuated with each other?" The other responds: "I don't think it could be infatuation because the bottom

## The Joke A restaurant advertises a new "Heart Attack Burger" -- a massive sandwich loaded with eggs, bacon, and a mound of extremely caloric ingredients. A customer asks what makes it a "heart att

## The Joke The comic depicts a conversation about lab-grown meat. A scientist explains that they have developed a process that produces ground beef from cell lines in a bioreactor, meaning "we can g

## The Joke Death (depicted as a hooded skeleton figure) stands at the edge of a dark river and tells a man: "To enter the Land of Shadows, you must cross over the River of Forgetfulness." The man re

## The Joke The comic shows someone giving another person a wedgie while simultaneously delivering a devastating personal insult: "Your fingers are too stubby for you to ever be a concert violinist -

## The Joke A woman questions why physics should work differently at various scales of measurement, saying it makes no sense. The man responds with a kind of resigned acceptance: "Look man, I dunno.