Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic plays on anxieties about AI replacing human workers, specifically software developers. In the first panel, a human coder asks a large, ominous-looking AI: "Do you think... when the AI supe

The comic opens with someone accusing "Darwinists" of wanting to reduce humans to "just being a sex-obsessed ape with no higher purpose." The Darwinist character (a bald man swimming in the ocean) res

In this comic, a woman asks someone to hand her "five hundred sextillion terabytes of flour." The man responds with exasperation: "Say 'cup.' Just say 'a cup' and I'll give you a cup." The woman huffi

This comic features a man praying to God, establishing two premises through Socratic questioning: (1) God's laws are immutable ("Duh. To say otherwise would imply a gap in my omnipotence"), and (2) st

The comic features a man asking "Dear Evolution" why inherited traits only work at the germline level -- why can't he alter his own body and pass those changes to his kids? Evolution (depicted as an a

In this single-panel comic, a professor stands at a chalkboard presenting an ethics scenario to a classroom: "You're in a runaway trolley, but you can switch tracks. Every time you hit an individual p

The comic shows a person sitting in a large leather swivel chair behind a desk, facing their spouse (Dr. Williams). The seated person dramatically intones: "Well well well, Dr. Williams. Seems you've

This comic explores the "Copernican Paradox" -- a self-referential problem with the Copernican Principle. The Copernican Principle states that we should assume there is no special vantage point in the

In this comic, a dejected-looking man sits while behind him a woman enthusiastically announces: "Long heavy sigh AND resigned droop of shoulders! COMBOOOOOOOOOOOO!" A machine next to the man displays

The comic shows two people looking at a large neuromorphic computer -- a machine designed not on digital architecture but to "directly mimic the structure of the human brain." When one asks "Does that

This comic is structured as a "me in the past vs. me now" comparison. In the top panel ("Me in the Past"), a younger version of the character sits watching TV and complains: "God, movie villains are s

This comic explores the anthropic principle applied to the dimensionality of time. Two characters in a hot air balloon discuss why there is only one dimension of time. The balloon pilot explains that

This comic takes the wholesome anger-management advice of "plant a tree when you're mad" and pushes it to its darkly logical extreme. A daughter asks her mother how she stays so calm. The mother expla

This comic satirizes the tech industry's concept of "user experience" by making it grotesquely literal. In the first panel, a man from Facebook physically attacks someone with a mace, breaking his arm

This single-panel comic depicts a post-apocalyptic landscape of ruins and rubble, through which a giant disembodied hand crawls. The hand announces various economic data: "Cheetos are seven dollars. T

This comic is a linguistics and tech nerd joke about pluralization rules. It begins with a simple office scenario: one person says they will send "the GIFs." A pedantic coworker objects, arguing that

This comic is set in a Catholic confessional, where a man cheerfully declines to confess. Instead, he launches into an enthusiastic philosophical argument: if the soul is immaterial, then by definitio

This comic imagines a "Depressing Revelation Olympics" -- a competitive event where contestants publicly share their most pathetic personal truths. A man stands on stage making the "okay" hand sign an

This comic tackles the hard problem of consciousness through a first-contact scenario with aliens. A human excitedly greets aliens, assuming they share consciousness, but the alien immediately correct

This comic reimagines the Sirens from Homer's Odyssey through the lens of aging and changing desires. Two friends discuss how the Sirens in the Iliad are not actually described as sexy -- they offer k

This single-panel comic shows an office setting where a boss tries to give more work to an employee named Dave, but cannot -- because Dave is wearing a shirt with a bold black-and-white geometric patt

This comic imagines a scenario in which our entire universe is actually an "agent-based model of the economy" -- a computer simulation built by some higher-dimensional researchers. The comic opens wit

This comic features a child asking their father a common question: "Dad, why do adults get bitter over time?" The father responds with a pseudo-evolutionary explanation that gets increasingly absurd.

This comic is a satire about the early internet's promise of creative freedom versus the reality of how online content is actually curated and consumed today. In the first panel, a person from the pa

This is a single-panel comic depicting a scene from Star Wars, but with all the dialogue replaced by Wookiee-style vocalizations: "Hhhh! WARRGHG GHAGHAGHHGHGHAGFFFHW AAA!" The characters appear to be

This comic plays on the modern push for gender-neutral language, specifically the replacement of "man-made" with "human-made." Two people are walking in a park. One admires a pond: "What a beautiful

This single-panel comic shows a person in bed waking up in apparent horror while screaming "FLESSHHHHHH! FLESHHHHHHHHHHHH! FLESH OF MANNNNNNNNNNNNN!" There is another person sleeping next to them, see

This comic is a philosophical exploration of solipsism -- the idea that only one's own mind can be known to exist -- played for both laughs and existential dread. A woman asks a man with glasses: "Do

This comic takes aim at the intersection of AI safety concerns and shallow motivational philosophy. In the first panel, a human asks a large robot: "Do you ever get bummed out thinking there's no way

This comic is about the life of Georg Cantor, the 19th-century mathematician who developed set theory and revolutionized the understanding of infinity, and how his story would be sensationalized for m

This single-panel comic shows a computer monitor displaying a CAPTCHA-style security prompt that reads: "Prove you are human by drawing a copyrighted Pokemon, using only penises." Below, the caption s

This comic plays on the logical structure of "if-then" statements, but applies it to the very different domain of romantic and sexual communication. In the first panel, one person asks another "Why d

This comic satirizes the public's relationship with science, portraying a scientist as a kind of neighborhood dealer who people approach for quick fixes of exciting scientific content. In the opening

This comic is a concise tour of three major frameworks in moral philosophy -- deontology, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics -- presented as a conversation between two people walking on a beach. The f

This comic is a single-panel joke about impostor syndrome, featuring a character wearing a comically obvious disguise -- oversized novelty glasses with a fake nose and mustache, and a bow tie -- sitti

This comic takes the concept of open-source software advocacy to its absurd extreme by applying open-source licensing principles to a person's own corpse. In the first panel, a bearded man (who visua

This comic riffs on the classic "monkey's paw" or "malicious genie" trope, where a wish is granted but with an unintended and horrible twist -- except here, the twist backfires on the genie instead.

This comic reimagines the Iliad -- specifically the conflict between Achilles and Hector and the fate of Troy -- through the lens of modern economic rationality and cost-benefit analysis. The comic o

This comic uses Batman's crime-fighting methodology to make a joke about the real-world usefulness of mathematics, specifically trigonometry and triangulation. The comic opens with Commissioner Gordo

This comic is a brief, sharp joke about faking orgasms, delivered with an absurd twist on the concept of "planning ahead." In the single panel, a woman tells a man at their front door: "Before we go

This comic imagines what would happen if we renamed all traditionally processed foods using the language of medieval alchemy, playing on public anxieties about "chemicals" in food. The setup shows a

This comic riffs on the Fermi Paradox -- the question of why, given the vast size and age of the universe, we have not detected any signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. The comic opens with a man

This comic plays on the tension between religious devotion and social convention, specifically the concept of perspective. In the first panel, someone asks a man how he can stay so happy while workin

This comic satirizes the trend of people using elaborate philosophical or pseudointellectual justifications to avoid doing things they simply do not want to do -- in this case, going to work. The cha

This comic satirizes the formulaic nature of television news writing and how the same basic story can be repackaged through different genre lenses. The setup shows a news producer urgently telling a

This comic is a parody of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," filtered through the lens of longtermism and existential risk -- philosophical movements associated with the effective altruism communit

This comic takes the concept of plant propagation by cuttings and grafting and applies it to human reproduction, with darkly humorous results. The setup has a character declaring: "Planting trees has

This comic parodies conspiracy theories about the authorship of Shakespeare's works -- a real and long-running debate in literary scholarship. The setup presents a character discussing an anti-Shakes

This comic is a simple domestic humor strip about the common relationship struggle of deciding what to have for dinner. One partner enthusiastically suggests: "One bean. One ENORMOUS bean." The other

This comic satirizes a particular brand of literary pretentiousness -- the author who claims not to invent stories but merely to "discover" or "channel" them. In the first panel, a writer declares: "