Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

## The Joke A shady-looking man in an alley calls out to a kid: "Hey kid, psst! Wanna get into a semantic argument?" The kid replies, "My dad warned me about people like you!" The man counters: "That

## The Joke A mother asks her baby in the classic parent-to-toddler style: "And what does a chimp say?" Instead of making an animal noise, the baby responds: "Chimps are incapable of language." The c

## The Joke The comic is divided into two sections: "Young Scientists" and "Old Scientists." In the "Young Scientists" panel, one person says "I wish you'd be more philosophical," and the other respo

## The Joke A woman is lecturing about computer science, explaining that a Turing machine is by definition a universal machine. She then adds a caveat: "Note: this is unlike a washing machine, which

## The Joke A professor presents the Chinese Room thought experiment to a class. She asks them to imagine a man in a room who receives Chinese symbols through a slot. The man uses a reference book of

## The Joke A girl tells her friend that Sally was mean to her yesterday, but she is not going to be mean back. Her friend affirms that it is important to always meet cruelty with kindness. When they

## The Joke A trick-or-treater arrives at a door dressed as a graph showing the increase in college tuition versus the increase in average wages over time. When the homeowner asks what the costume is

## The Joke A man bursts through a doorway announcing "Hey, teenage me! I have come back in time to give you advice!" His teenage self, sitting at a computer, dismisses him: "Sorry, I am busy posting

## The Joke A professor tells a class (which includes what appears to be God, depicted as a large golden/orange figure) that "in the simple case, we can prove by induction that there is no largest nu

## The Joke The comic presents a grid chart titled "Sex: A Guide" that classifies types of sex along two axes: Romance (low, middling, high) and Intensity (low, middling, high). The resulting combina

## The Joke This comic is a promotional strip for Zach Weinersmith's book of religion jokes. In it, the cartoonist (depicted as a redheaded character) visits God to pitch the idea. God describes SMBC

## The Joke A government official at a podium announces that people are more afraid of shark attacks than of car accidents, despite cars being millions of times more likely to kill them. Rather than

## The Joke A TSA-style airport security agent stops a traveler and says: "Sir, before we can let you into the terminal, please remove your sandals." The traveler complies. The agent then demands his

## The Joke The comic presents a series of "facts" about human physiology: the sound of baby screaming increases adrenaline, the sight of sexy videos increases testosterone, and nobody has funded the

## The Joke A physics professor announces he has come up with a clever analogy for electric current using armadillos. His students protest that the existing concept of electric current is already not

## The Joke Titled "Every Discussion of Current Kids' Shows," the comic shows a father sitting on a couch with his young daughter, complaining: "Ugh. Children's entertainment was way more engaging ba

## The Joke The comic is a long-form strip that walks through the history and mechanics of financial trading, starting from basic bartering and escalating through increasingly abstract and absurd lay

## The Joke A teacher catches a student named Billy Anderson sending a note in class. Rather than punishing him, she invites him to come up and read it to the class -- the classic teacher move. The n

## The Joke A girl tells her father "Daddy, I love you," and he responds with alarm: "Whoa whoa whoa, hold up. I have temporarily exhausted all of my emotions, young lady." He explains that holidays

## The Joke A character learns about cognitive biases — confirmation bias, anchoring, availability heuristic, Dunning-Kruger effect, etc. — and confidently declares that now that they know about thes

## The Joke A man asks a woman, "Hey, do you like pickup lines about pickup lines?" She responds, "I've never heard one." He delivers: "I've never META girl who had." The next panel shows them in bed

## The Joke Two people stand before a grand Colosseum-like structure. One declares, "It took five years of constant labor, but it is at last complete." The other proclaims, "Man has made no greater s

## The Joke An older man complains to a younger person about kids today: "You get them a big fancy toy and all they do is play with the box!" He then pivots to complaining about adults: "You have acc

## The Joke A woman is shown on a screen (a recording) saying: "I probably won't survive the operation. You are only a baby and I can't properly say goodbye. So for you, my daughter, I recorded this

## The Joke Two people discuss what the most American movie ever made is. One says "Ghostbusters," and explains: people discover there is life beyond the pale of death, so they start a small business

## The Joke The comic presents a sprawling, multi-panel narrative about a to-do app that becomes increasingly grandiose and dystopian. What starts as a simple productivity app pitch escalates through

## The Joke A woman gives her daughter a dreamcatcher, explaining that it catches bad dreams and that she has had it since she was a little girl. The daughter points out the logical flaw: if the drea

## The Joke The comic presents a simple 2x2 matrix titled "Science Articles: A Guide." The two axes are sentence complexity (easy vs. hard to understand) and subject matter complexity (complex vs. si

## The Joke The comic opens with a child asking the classic question, "Mom, where do babies come from?" The mother begins stumbling through the standard awkward explanation -- "Well, I, uh... when a

## The Joke Two people in bed discuss the concept of an "ethical singularity" — a play on the technological singularity. They observe that each generation is horrified by the previous generation's et

## The Joke A large albatross flies through the sky holding a crossbow, declaring "The bird is the word, motherfucker." The caption below reads: "In the movie version of Rime of the Ancient Mariner,

## The Joke The comic is set in a future where "designer babies" — genetically engineered children — have become not only ethical but necessary. Two young women discuss this casually. One says her pa

## The Joke A couple explains their approach to "non-judgmental parenting": they do not believe in corporal punishment, verbal reprimands, or saying "no." Instead, they have devised elaborate mechani

## The Joke The comic presents a lecture or presentation on "Infernomics" — the economics of Hell. A presenter explains that Hell's economy has unique properties: because everyone is already maximall

## The Joke A man asks his friend about his relationship. The friend says it is tough because they are doing "long-distance." He explains that finding time to talk is hard, that he is never there whe

## The Joke A woman observes that babies are weird: they cry like the world is ending, then immediately become happy when given what they want, as if nothing happened. Her companion asks what she wou

## The Joke The comic imagines Sigmund Freud analyzing the game of Tetris through his signature psychoanalytic lens. A figure resembling Freud sits at a computer and narrates Tetris gameplay in absur

## The Joke A car honks at a pedestrian to move faster. The pedestrian protests that she is walking as fast as she can, but the driver retorts that her absolute speed is not the issue -- what matters

## The Joke A man stands at a podium (apparently at some kind of white-supremacist or anti-immigration rally) and says: "You guys hate the people from the least developed nations. Less developed coun

## The Joke A mugger confronts a victim in an alley, demanding: "Gimme yer wallet!" The victim nervously replies: "But there'''s no money in it!" The mugger cheerfully responds: "That'''s okay, I'''m

## The Joke A woman at what appears to be a social gathering announces: "Sometimes I think I'''m just a machine outputting programming. All of my actions can be easily tied to my evolutionary history

## The Joke A child tells his father: "Dad! There'''s a monster under my bed!" The father replies with alarm, then proceeds to give a hilariously over-the-top assessment of the situation: the bedfram

## The Joke A person in an office tells a coworker: "If you won'''t be needing me, I'''m going to stop rendering myself in order to minimize system requirements." The caption below reads: "Fun Fact:

## The Joke Two people are walking through a forest in springtime, surrounded by birds, frogs, and insects making various sounds ("Tweet! Tweet! Guh!", "Chirrrrrp!", "Croooooak"). One person romantic

## The Joke The comic is split into two panels. The top panel, labeled "Modern Age People," shows a person gazing wistfully at a starry sky and thinking: "Too late to explore the world. Too early to

## The Joke A student approaches a professor'''s desk and asks: "Professor, before we start, do you believe in testing on animals for non-medical applications?" The professor replies: "Absolutely not

## The Joke A woman describes how she has gained the ability to control her dreams. She starts by describing mundane dream-control scenarios — flying, visiting exotic places — but quickly escalates t

## The Joke The comic is split into two panels showing the same person (a long-haired man) reacting differently in two situations. In the first panel, he passes a poorly-trained pitbull on the street

## The Joke A mother is chaperoning her daughter Charlotte's date with a boy named Bobby by using an autonomous flying drone to surveil them. Bobby nervously says he thinks Charlotte's hair looks nic

## The Joke The comic shows Sherlock Holmes making a classic Holmesian deduction: "The crucial clue was, in fact, an analysis of the handwriting on that card. You can tell much about a man's characte