Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

## The Joke A character argues that the natural outcome of utilitarian ethics is that we should be as judgmental of other people as possible. His reasoning: when you silently judge other people, you

## The Joke The comic shows a bearded man in ancient Greek attire (clearly meant to be Plato) declaring: "I think we should visualize all people who disagree with me as blind cavedwellers." The capti

## The Joke A math teacher begins a proof with the standard mathematical phrasing: "Suppose there exists a triangle ABC." A student immediately objects: "NO! I will not! Why do we always let mathemat

## The Joke A person lying in bed is visited by Hurley, a "helpful elf" who has come to help them discover the true meaning of friendship. After conducting research, the elf announces that the defini

## The Joke The comic opens with someone demanding to know where all the futuristic technologies are: flying cars, Martian outposts, pocket supercomputers with London battery life. Another character

## The Joke A man complains: "God, I swear it's like there's a jerk society trying to get me." Another person responds: "I think that's just a problem with subjective analysis" — explaining that we a

## The Joke A woman named Lisa is breaking up with Sally, declaring: "It's over, Sally. You care more about efficiency than feelings!" Sally's response, rather than an emotional plea, perfectly prove

## The Joke The comic contrasts how different academic disciplines behave at parties. The physicist talks about how everything is physics. The philosopher questions whether the party even exists. The

## The Joke A bully takes a kid's lunch money, and the kid responds by threatening to 3D-bioprint a sentient copy of the bully, trap it in a sealed glass cage without food or water, and whisper to it

## The Joke A former unpaid intern sues a law firm for back wages. The lawyer at the firm points out a catch-22: if the intern learned enough to know they could sue for back wages, then they must hav

## The Joke A man arrives at a support group for people with a fear of mathematics. The group leader welcomes everyone and then, before they begin, asks if anyone is interested in lottery tickets or

## The Joke A nature-documentary-style comic presents "scientists" offering increasingly absurd ad hoc explanations for squirrel behavior. It starts with a seemingly reasonable claim -- squirrels bur

## The Joke Two people discuss a serial killer who turned his victims into bread. The killer lured children with his ice cream truck, put them in the freezer, transferred the corpses to a freeze-drye

## The Joke A person makes a deal with the Devil: whenever they need something, they can reach into a bag and money will be there. Later, the person tries to pay for new shoes but finds nothing in th

## The Joke Two kids decide to play a biblical version of Rock-Paper-Scissors called "Jonah-Moses-Noah." The rules are: Jonah beats Noah because Jonah survived inside a whale during the flood; Noah b

## The Joke The comic is split into two halves. The top half, labeled "Stated Reason," shows a scientist giving an inspirational answer to why she studies space propulsion: "Humans have always been e

## The Joke A man is frantically apologizing: "I didn't mean it! It was the heat of the moment! I was trying to participate!" The flashback labeled "Earlier..." reveals what happened: during an intim

## The Joke A person tries to convince Superman that he's wasting his potential by fighting crime. Through a series of arguments, the person explains that Superman could contribute far more to humani

## The Joke The Joker announces his latest evil scheme: he has put amphetamines in Gotham's water supply. Batman arrives to stop him, but the Joker declares it is too late -- everyone is already hook

## The Joke A child tells their parents there is a monster in the dark. The father, rather than comforting the child, launches into a pedantic epistemological argument: he explains that it is impossi

## The Joke The comic presents a fictional history of Charles Babbage, who in the early 19th century designed the world's first computer, the Analytical Engine. The comic notes that the original desi

## The Joke A Stoic philosopher, standing before a Greek temple, declares that hedonists are wrong to give in to momentary pleasure, saying it is not the true path to happiness. He explains that as a

## The Joke Two women are sitting together, and one tells an old joke about business: "A guy says he is losing ten cents on every sale. His partner replies, it is okay, we will make it up on volume."

## The Joke A man excitedly announces he is testing a new compact teleportation device. He explains that you only have to bring it to your face to be instantaneously transported to the alley behind T

## The Joke A woman tells her partner she bought a plus pump. Her partner says she will be just fine. She clarifies: "Not that kind of pump -- it is an energy storage system." She explains that the e

## The Joke God appears to a person and tells them they have been chosen for a special mission. The person is overjoyed — until God explains that the mission is something completely mundane, like fil

## The Joke The comic is captioned "Never let a chemist read your romance novel." A bespectacled man (the chemist) is reading a romance novel and indignantly tells the author that the phrase "he was

## The Joke A woman presents her invention: the Ethical Fourier Transform. She explains that just as a mathematical Fourier transform decomposes a complex signal into simple component waves, her ethi

## The Joke A man covered head to toe in a ghillie suit (leafy camouflage) sits on a couch next to a woman, holding what appears to be a TV remote. He calls out "Steve? Steeeeeeve? God, I wonder wher

## The Joke A group of academic specialists — a paleontologist, a physicist, and an astrophysicist — form "The League of Curmudgeons." Each of them is an expert in a narrow field who gets annoyed by

## The Joke Superman announces he will use his "super-breath" to freeze the surface of the ocean and stop an incoming hurricane. A bystander wonders how much energy it would take to freeze the entire

## The Joke Someone asks Robin Hood how he gets so much money through "quantitative finance" when they have never seen him robbing from the rich. Robin Hood explains that he created the most complex

## The Joke A man (resembling the mathematician John Nash from the film *A Beautiful Mind*) begins making observations about cats: a cat is not an autonomous process but rather an interaction between

## The Joke A young man in a bow tie (depicted as the poet Dylan Thomas) says: "Actually DO go gently into that good night." The caption reads: "Shortly after Dylan Thomas discovers his father's inve

## The Joke A green creature (representing natural selection personified) approaches a person and says: "Hey, natural selection here. You know how you made the right brain for emotions and the left b

## The Joke A presenter explains that economists have long tried to predict the behavior of the world's economy but have failed, because "humans don't behave in a predictable, rational, economically

## The Joke Two people are camping under the stars. One asks, "Do we really need philosophy of life?" and notes that the Stoic philosopher Musonius wrote entire sections about how you should not get

## The Joke A mother tells her children she is grounding them, but another woman (speaking in a formal, bureaucratic tone) says: "I'm sorry, we don't accept your 'grounding.'" She explains that it is

## The Joke A child asks her mother: "Mom, do all of God's creatures go to heaven?" The mother says, "Of course!" The child then works through the implications. Some of God's creatures (K-strategists

## The Joke The comic is set entirely in darkness (a black panel), with only speech bubbles visible. One person screams "AAAH! Why are you putting a spoon in my ear?!" and the other calmly responds,

## The Joke This long-form comic traces a dystopian progression of what happens when running for president becomes more profitable than actually governing. It follows several escalating stages: 1. *

## The Joke A man is dramatically lamenting: "Oh my God, my life is ruined! I could've been in the big league! Now I knocked up some middle-aged matron! This is a nightmare!" He appears to be in genu

## The Joke The comic opens with a classic anxiety scenario: a person is having the "exam nightmare" -- "Oh my God, I'm having that nightmare where it's final exams, but I haven't read any of the boo

## The Joke A couple is in bed together, and the man is desperately trying to delay his sexual climax. He frantically thinks: "Oh God, not yet, you have to last longer than 30 seconds. Think about...

## The Joke The comic compares a husband and wife's approaches to cleaning, expressed as programming pseudocode. **The wife's cleaning algorithm** is efficient and straightforward: ``` things = get_

## The Joke The comic opens with a "fun fact" header: "The phrase 'silent majority' was originally a euphemism for 'all dead people.' Fun Fact 2: Politics is way more fun if you appreciate etymology.

## The Joke The comic is titled "The Five Stages of Learning About the Kubler-Ross Model" and maps the famous "five stages of grief" onto the experience of actually learning about the model itself:

## The Joke The comic follows a conversation between two people about education. A bald man in glasses tells a younger woman: "Cally, you should read more classics." She responds: "But you never read

## The Joke The comic presents a dark fable titled "The Tale of the Caterpillar and the Ant." Two ants discover a caterpillar. One observes: "The caterpillar is made of nutrition." The other adds: "T

## The Joke A professor explains the mathematical concept of a "transform" — where you take a hard problem, convert it to an easier problem, solve that, and then convert back. A woman in the audience