Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

## The Joke The comic retells the classic fairy tale "The Ugly Duckling" by Hans Christian Andersen, but with a cynical, realistic twist. In the original story, an ugly duckling is mocked by the othe

## The Joke The comic depicts a funeral eulogy where the speaker is trying to emphasize just how dead the deceased person is. Rather than offering comforting words or fond memories, the eulogist keep

## The Joke The comic is titled "Overlooked Opportunities: Retirement Planning for People Who Believe Worldwide Collapse Is Imminent." It shows a financial advisor-type figure sitting across a desk f

## The Joke The comic offers a "pro tip" for thermodynamics tests: whenever a question asks you to determine an object's temperature, simply write "T = 2.73 K" with the caveat "(assume well-mixed Cos

## The Joke The comic contrasts two situations involving the same woman. In the left panel, labeled "When someone tells you that your social views are equivalent to murder," she responds calmly with

## The Joke The comic shows a conversation between a woman and a man. She tells him she wants to know why he is bad at small talk. He explains that he is "just not interested in trivialities" and wis

## The Joke The comic presents "A History of Western Sociology" in four panels, each representing a different era. In the Medieval period, a monarch declares "You people are supposed to be divided."

## The Joke The comic shows a bearded man standing on the side of a road, hitchhiking with his thumb out. Instead of a sign listing a destination like "Los Angeles" or "New York," his sign reads "Hal

## The Joke The comic shows a man coming home from work, excitedly announcing to his wife "Hey, honey! Guess who just got promoted?" The wife, rather than congratulating him, responds with "That guy

## The Joke The comic shows an older man sitting at a table with two other men, delivering what he presents as a "hot tip" for getting a woman to have sex with you. His advice is to court her, marry

## The Joke A person asks a fortune teller (wearing a stereotypical mystic outfit with a tall hat) what the "mystic bones" said. The fortune teller replies with terrible news: the bones said the pers

## The Joke The comic is titled "Funtime Activity: Turning Mathematicians Against Capitalism." It shows a man standing at a chalkboard with a graph diagram (nodes connected by arrows in a cycle), add

## The Joke A man is lying on a therapist's couch expressing an unusual anxiety: he worries that he is not repressing anything. He frets that he does not secretly want to kill anyone or have sex with

## The Joke A man is being confronted (presumably by his boss) about something he has done wrong at work -- most likely he is the one not wearing pants. His retort is to invoke multiverse theory: "Oh

## The Joke A professor begins a math PhD class by telling a story from Plutarch: Solon was amazed that Thales of Miletus, the first great mathematician, did not want to marry or have kids. So Thales

## The Joke A job applicant tells the interviewer that the best available data suggests job interviews are largely pointless, and that even resumes tell us nothing about a person's ability to do the

## The Joke A woman tells her companion that she is a "moral relativist." Her companion assumes she means she does not believe in the concept of moral truth -- the standard philosophical meaning of m

## The Joke A man tells a woman he is "developing a beer gut." She tells him to relax, assuming he means the common phrase for gaining belly fat from drinking beer. But he clarifies: he means he is l

## The Joke The comic presents a "Fun Fact" claiming that the difference between Eastern and Western religion can be understood entirely by looking at monastic hairstyles. On the left, a Buddhist mon

## The Joke A woman proudly tells a child that she created a computer that says "You suck, Bobby" over and over. She then explains that the computer was sent to space on a collision course with the n

## The Joke A patient sitting on an exam table in a medical office asks the doctor, "How did it go, doc?" The doctor, holding a clipboard, responds with "Well, for starters... EW!" The caption beneat

## The Joke A woman excitedly tells a man that she has had her brain replaced by a transmitter. She explains that it interfaces with millions of small computers that float around the environment. Now

## The Joke The comic opens with a caption presenting a problem and solution: "Problem: Large bureaucracies tend to be slow and inefficient. Solution: Create large bureaucracies for stuff we don't li

## The Joke A person is reading a book with a look of dismay. The text they are reading aloud says: "And so we beat on enjoying Coca-Cola, borne ceaselessly forth into refreshment"? The caption below

## The Joke A man is trying to set a password on his device. The system tells him his password is too weak and demands he add two numbers and a capital letter. He complies, but the system says it is

## The Joke A woman enters what appears to be a dining area decorated with Star Wars napkins and plates, and sees someone dressed in a full Darth Vader costume, complete with a glowing red lightsaber

## The Joke A dark, robed figure (resembling a cultist or dark priest) appears before a man named Steve, telling him the world is in turmoil because the gods are displeased. Steve is the last descend

## The Joke The comic presents a series of graphs that build a logical chain of absurd evolutionary reasoning. Graph 1 shows the "Cost of Rearing a Child to Adulthood" increasing exponentially over t

## The Joke Under the banner "Important Moments in Philosophy," a woman is on a date with Friedrich Nietzsche and expresses hesitation about sleeping together. Nietzsche responds to each of her objec

## The Joke A man who appears to be God (depicted with long hair, a beard, and a suit) is performing stand-up comedy on stage. His "joke" is a deeply tragic observation: a man spends his entire life

## The Joke Two teachers are discussing substitute teaching. One explains that substitute teachers have created "The Cucumber Challenge" -- the goal is to teach every class EXCEPT sex education by us

## The Joke A woman is in what appears to be an office or meeting, rattling off a bizarre list of phrases: "My eyes are filled with worms," "Down with representative government," "Blood my God so muc

## The Joke A woman is giving a presentation (apparently a funding pitch) for an invention she calls "The Relativistic De-Awkwardizer." She begins by observing that the most common factor preventing

## The Joke A grizzled, elderly professor stands at a chalkboard on which he has written "O(1)" and describes his sorting algorithm: "Take a list of elements. Wait until this sordid human farce breat

## The Joke A man comes home and excitedly tells his wife that he met a magic leprechaun who grants wishes. His wife, thrilled, immediately asks: "Are we rich? Are we debt free? Can we finally buy th

## The Joke The comic presents three panels contrasting how different people react to seeing a bird's nest. "What normal people do" shows a person simply exclaiming, "Hey look! A bird's nest!" "What

## The Joke A woman announces to her husband that she has terrible news: she has discovered that the entire world is a fantasy, that she is asleep and has dreamed all of it -- the children, the city,

## The Joke A job interview opens with a remarkably candid question: "In what ways are you broken and how would they improve your job performance?" The interviewee, Tim, responds that he is incapable

## The Joke A mother tells her daughter Sally that they cannot handle any more kids, but since she knows a regular puppy will not make up for it, she has been selectively breeding dogs for intelligen

## The Joke The comic presents a "Science Idea" in which a researcher describes an experiment performed on rats. Two colonies of rats were reared together, then separated. They were introduced to oth

## The Joke The comic addresses a common misunderstanding in energy reporting. Popular science articles frequently report that a country or region has more solar capacity than fossil fuel capacity, a

## The Joke A character explains the economic concept of externalities — costs or benefits that affect third parties who didn't choose to be involved. The explanation starts with a textbook example (

## The Joke The comic is titled "Sad Truths: Mythological Creature Edition" and presents a series of panels, each revealing an uncomfortable or disappointing "realistic" truth about a mythological cr

## The Joke In the first panel, a woman describes an app she has created: it takes the URL and logo of websites you visit frequently and changes them to reflect their actual effect on you. The other

## The Joke A wealthy-looking man offers to pay 200 million dollars to send someone around the Moon and back. The other person points out a catch: since they will be on the far side of the Moon, they

## The Joke This is a long-form comic that serves as a parody of the Dilbert comic strip by Scott Adams. The comic follows a Dilbert-like engineer character named Wally through his dreary cubicle-dwe

## The Joke In the first panel, a man wistfully says he wishes human beings were as peaceful and loving as bonobos. A woman responds enthusiastically: "Then find a way to make it happen! We are the g

## The Joke The comic is titled "Funtime Activity: Going to math lectures and using the word 'arbitrarily' the way it is used everywhere outside of mathematics." A math professor at a chalkboard says

## The Joke A physicist declares that "physics is the poetry of reality." Another person challenges this by asking why physics people always say that -- pointing out that just last week they talked a

## The Joke The comic depicts a post-robot-apocalypse scenario. Susan says "I miss having control of my endocrine system," implying that robot overlords have taken over and now control humans at a bi