Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

## The Joke The comic shows a woman bursting out of a large tiered cake -- the classic bachelor party trope -- but instead of a stripper or exotic dancer, she is a sociologist. She enthusiastically d

## The Joke In the first panel, a woman in an intimate moment with a man says "Oh, Tom! Say my name!" The man responds literally: "My name." In the second panel, another woman observes this and asks,

## The Joke Self-driving cars are presented as facing a real-world version of the trolley problem: in an unavoidable crash, should the car protect its passenger or minimize total casualties? The joke

## The Joke An elderly person on their deathbed tells their family their dying wish: to be cremated and have their ashes put under an apple tree, so the tree will turn the ashes into apples and produ

## The Joke A father is reading a bedtime story to his child, describing a "full-sized hobbit house" like in The Lord of the Rings, complete with a round door, windows into a valley, and a working fi

## The Joke The comic retells the biblical Book of Job as an escalating series of failed attempts by God (and later the Devil) to manipulate a man named Job. God first sends the Devil to ruin Job's l

## The Joke The comic tells a story about the pharmaceutical industry in several panels. First, a narrator explains that people were "tired of pharma-digital companies spending more on marketing than

## The Joke Two people are discussing Noah's Ark. One says she does not understand the moral of the story: "Why was the flood necessary? If all the bad people needed to die, why not just eliminate th

## The Joke Two people are having the classic internet argument about how to pronounce "GIF" -- is it a hard G ("gif") or a soft G ("jif")? A third person interjects that this is "a stupid discussion

## The Joke The comic depicts a conversation with Socrates. Someone asks, "Why are you the wisest man amongst all these educated men?" Socrates replies with his famous line: "Because I know one thing

## The Joke A person is reading a scavenger hunt list. The single item on the list reads: "Items to find: The list of all lists that do not list themselves. (list here)." The caption below states, "N

## The Joke A professor is lecturing about graph theory, explaining that "we have a graph which embodies a stochastic process" and that they will "perform a drunk walk on the graph for n steps." But

## The Joke This is a promotional comic for the book "Soonish" by Zach and Kelly Weinersmith. A politician announces that "the world has become too politically polarized" and that people are "less an

## The Joke The comic references the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment, in which children were offered a choice between one marshmallow immediately or two marshmallows if they could wait for a p

## The Joke The caption reads: "Late in life, Isaac Newton decides to tell non-physicists they're doing everything wrong." Newton is shown smugly declaring, "If I have looked down on more people, it

## The Joke A little girl tells a genie (or magical figure) "I wish my favorite carousel pony was real." The wish is granted, and in the final panel we see the result: a horse impaled through its bod

## The Joke A mad scientist announces he has spent decades creating a device that can scan all of time and space to find and bring "history's greatest villain" to the present. He activates his "time

## The Joke A professor-like figure (identified in the caption as "Professor Plait") states: "According to the no-communication theorem, information cannot travel faster than light. It follows that n

## The Joke This comic is presented as a faux-educational infographic titled "New Approaches to Fuel Efficiency," listing five increasingly absurd car design concepts, each with a "Pros" and "Cons" l

## The Joke A man approaches a faith healer, begging to be cured of his "horrible gullibility." The preacher obliges, shouting "Hear me, demons of gullibility! I cast you out!" The man immediately fe

## The Joke A man announces to his partner, "Hey honey, I'm wearing edible underwear right now." She responds with interest: "Ooh... show me..." He then reveals what he means: "Technically, these beg

## The Joke A mother gives her young daughter a patch of the garden, telling her it is hers to do what she likes with. The daughter immediately asks for mineral rights. The mother casually agrees --

## The Joke Written by Zach Weinersmith and illustrated by Abby Howard, this comic features a man named Steve who reacts to a power outage by immediately going full post-apocalyptic: donning spiked a

## The Joke A father confronts his son after the boy's mother found marijuana in his room. When the son shamefully admits to smoking it, the father erupts -- not with the expected anti-drug tirade, b

## The Joke A man at a bar is lecturing his companion about how people oversimplify the role of hormones, comparing it to expecting a single musical tone to only work in one kind of music. He then la

## The Joke A father proudly announces that he has "kidproofed" his office to keep the children out. His wife responds by announcing she has "dadproofed" the kitchen. The father scoffs, claiming he i

## The Joke Two people are eating sandwiches, and one asks to have a bite of the other's sandwich. The other person protests that they ordered the same sandwich, so there should be no difference. The

## The Joke A parent announces the results of a family vote: "One vote for vacation at Disney, and two votes for spending summer reading the dictionary and not talking back." The children protest "Bu

## The Joke The comic sets up the classic "walks into a bar" joke format: an American, an Englishman, and an Irishman enter a bar. However, instead of the usual punchline structure, the joke takes a

## The Joke A person complains to God about the conservation of energy, asking why we cannot create or destroy energy and get something for nothing. God responds: "You mean like how we ban people fro

## The Joke Superman is questioned about why he spends time changing into his costume before saving people. He tries to explain with "branding," but the interviewer pushes further: "What good does th

## The Joke The comic depicts a biblical or mythological scene -- a figure resembling Jesus stands on a mountaintop addressing a crowd. The caption reads: "Best use of a time machine: introducing pro

## The Joke A person challenges an angel by saying that the idea of heaven does not make sense. The angel explains that "human happiness tends to be relative" -- it requires us to look down on everyo

## The Joke A person announces they do not believe in eating some animals. Another person challenges them: "Goody, that wouldn't be ethical." The first person agrees -- they already avoid eating "lar

## The Joke The comic shows a scene from The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings: characters in Mirkwood Forest, with one saying "This doesn't seem right, Bilbo" and another replying "Quit complaining -- gettin

## The Joke The comic tackles the philosophical concept of simulationism -- the hypothesis that our reality might be a computer simulation run by a more advanced civilization. A character opens with:

## The Joke A person standing in the rain is asked "Why does it rain?" They give a scientific answer: "Because God wants to give us something beautiful." Their companion pushes back: "So whenever God

## The Joke The comic features a conversation between two characters about the appeal of abstraction. One character asks: "Why are you attracted to me?" The other responds: "I guess I've always had a

## The Joke The comic explores the idea of a "neuroscientific pickup line." In the first panel, a character proposes: "Useful man, does a neuroscientist give an intellectual pickup line?" The setup s

## The Joke The comic is captioned "The first math class" and depicts a prehistoric scene where a caveman teacher is trying to explain the concept of counting to a young student. The teacher says: "W

## The Joke The comic shows a single large panel featuring a container (resembling a bucket or tub of toy building blocks) with a label that reads: "Hey Kid! Build your own fuckin' toy, OK?" Below th

## The Joke The comic presents a single-panel scenario with a caption at the top reading: "If I were a pilot, I would make up new physics for every flight." Below, a commercial airplane is shown taki

## The Joke A character reads an entire book on a complex topic and proudly considers themselves educated on the subject. An expert in the field explains that one book is roughly 0.1% of what you'd n

## The Joke The comic plays on the statistical concept of "regression to the mean." In the first panel, one character tells another: "You get more beautiful every day." The other responds with surpri

## The Joke This is a longer-format comic that explores the concept of "dream inequality" -- the idea that some people have amazing, vivid, adventure-filled dreams while others are stuck with boring

## The Joke The comic is divided into two panels that contrast what people say they want from their political leaders with how they actually react. The top panel, labeled "What people say they want f

## The Joke The comic features a group of characters debating the nature of saltwater taffy. One character passionately argues that saltwater taffy is proof that the universe is beautiful and sublime

## The Joke A professor is lecturing about monism -- the philosophical position that mind and body are not separate but are aspects of the same underlying reality. He explains that dualists believe m

## The Joke A person arrives in heaven and discovers that there is no pain -- physical or emotional. They are thrilled and immediately test this by announcing that their "very person was harsh or cri

## The Joke A woman is speaking affectionately to a robot called Mechatron-9X, telling it, "What I love about you, Mechatron-9X, is that you see the real me." The robot responds with a coldly literal