Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

## The Joke Two people are leaving a modern art museum, with one complaining that they always go and never understand the art. The other fears that if people follow their lead and stop funding the ar

## The Joke A woman named Sally joyfully greets her deceased partner Bobby, who has returned as a ghost. Bobby emotionally declares he promised to find his way home and that their time of grieving is

## The Joke Jesus stands on a rooftop in a city at night and shouts "Body of Christ!" while hurling a communion wafer like a frisbee or throwing star. The wafer flies through the air over the city sk

## The Joke A couple attempts to have a steamy encounter in the dark. The man starts with suggestive talk, but immediately things go wrong: he steps on a Lego, then a banana. They realize they have n

## The Joke The comic is titled "Funtime Activity: Breakup Lines with Exactly One Letter Changed." It presents three classic breakup lines, each with a single letter altered to create a completely di

## The Joke The comic presents a long, elaborate political scenario in which a society adopts an "obliviocracy" -- a system of government where the most oblivious, uninformed person is placed in char

## The Joke A parent is telling their child the biblical story of Jesus cursing the fig tree (found in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew). In the story, Jesus is hungry, finds a fig tree with no fruit,

## The Joke An alien visits Earth and explains that "conservation of energy is a political law, not a physical one." The alien reveals that if too much extra energy is created, the universe could col

## The Joke A woman asks a shirtless man "You like that?" referring to something she has done with her body hair. The man responds uncertainly, "It's... different?" She explains: "I only waxed the lo

## The Joke A group of people discover a time capsule from the past. As they open it, they find various artifacts and explain them to each other. One item is identified as "a T. Rex femur" -- they no

## The Joke The top panel shows a grumpy-looking cat (resembling Garfield) saying: "Dude, come on. It's my day off. I work all week and on my day off I just wanna chill out and watch gameshows, okay?

## The Joke The comic presents an elaborate engineering diagram for generating infinite clean energy using clowns. The steps are: (1) Take a clown, attach them to the ceiling of an air-tight tower. (

## The Joke In the first panel, a group of people sit around a conference table. One person states: "Good planners contribute more to the economy. We need a way to quietly make a massive wealth trans

## The Joke A man sits at a table with Chinese takeout food, exasperated: "Oh come on! Three?! I got ONE entree and a soup!" He is upset about receiving three fortune cookies with his meal for one pe

## The Joke A woman asks her partner: "Baby, would you ever cheat on me?" The partner responds: "Yes, absolutely." Shocked, the woman says "What?!" The partner then clarifies by reframing the questio

## The Joke A man pitches an imaginary product to his friend: a "happiness spigot" you can install in your house that activates just by looking at it. The catch is that the spigot requires constant m

## The Joke A man enthusiastically proposes the concept of a "car-boat" -- a vehicle that works as a car on land and then becomes a boat when you hit the ocean. His friend immediately points out, wit

## The Joke A person complains that it is unfair that "organic chemistry" gets a special name when all it deals with is carbon-based compounds and other "lame stuff." A woman who identifies as an ino

## The Joke The comic opens with a biblical-sounding scene where someone quotes the saying "You do not inherit the Earth. The Earth is for the meek." Another character asks, "But who is meeker than w

## The Joke A human asks a robot what it is watching. The robot explains it is a "robot-specific horror genre" about robots whose quantum brains suddenly shut down, leaving them unable to empathize w

## The Joke A woman declares that "evolutionary psychology is all bullshit" because its practitioners "just imagine they know what humanity's past was like and then make absurd extrapolations based o

## The Joke A man romantically tells his partner, "Baby, you and I are like two carbon atoms that came together to form a single bond." She finds this wonderful. In the next panel, labeled "Later," t

## The Joke The comic is titled "Funtime Activity: Rebus Puzzles With No Proper Answer." A man holds up a sign showing a rebus puzzle consisting of a duck, a wrench, the letter T, and an ankle/foot.

## The Joke A person observes that "everyone seems so anxious and angry these days" and presents a thought experiment to explain why. As an early human, you might meet 150 people in your lifetime. If

## The Joke The comic is a long-form exploration of the baseball metaphor for sexual progress (first base = kissing, second base = touching, third base = oral sex, home run = sex). It begins with an

## The Joke A couple is in bed, and the man suggests that after the kids are asleep, they should go to the bedroom and "do that thing we do a couple times a month" that "always goes pretty much the s

## The Joke A woman is panicking because she sent a sexy email to the wrong address -- specifically to her ex. She considers handling it maturely ("Well, I could just be an adult about this"), but in

## The Joke The comic opens with a character declaring, "I don't believe in the concept of heaven. The concept doesn't make sense." Their reasoning, laid out in the second panel, is surprisingly prag

## The Joke A man is excitedly examining what appears to be a piece of amber with a mosquito trapped inside, crystallized during the late Miocene epoch. He launches into a breathless monologue about

## The Joke Two people are discussing how the human brain is faster than a supercomputer. One person points out that brains are faster at "computing stuff," clarifying that the brain can do things a

## The Joke A mugger threatens a librarian, but instead of a weapon, the threat is: "Gimme yer wallet or I'll put this astrology book in the reference section!" The librarian immediately caves: "Take

## The Joke A STEM student mocks a liberal arts student for studying something "useless." The liberal arts student points out that the STEM student can build powerful technology but has no framework

## The Joke A woman is giving a speech about why humans are special: they are the pinnacle of creation, the only ones who can feel, have reason, and use language. She adds that Earth is the center of

## The Joke The comic presents a "Parenting Tip" that reads: "Any shitty thing your kid does can be considered a 'developmental milestone.'" Below, a mother is speaking to someone (presumably another

## The Joke A man on his deathbed describes his elaborate posthumous revenge plan: he wants a tree planted above his body, and over his lifetime he has filled his body with heavy metals like cadmium

## The Joke A Valkyrie on horseback is selecting which warrior will die in battle, as is her mythological duty. She begins dramatically: "Annnd... the next warrior I select to die in battle is... u..

## The Joke This comic is a meta-announcement from Zach Weinersmith about a real product: a monocle. The comic is structured as an advertisement. Zach explains that he had an idea for a product -- a

## The Joke A researcher explains the concept of an "Erotic Turing Test" -- if you have sex with a robot and you can't tell that it's a robot, you can consider it to have "erotic consciousness." She

## The Joke A group of revolutionaries triumphantly declare: "We have overthrown the oppressors! Let our flag be the color of blood! And let its emblem be a sword of nine blades!" The next panel reve

## The Joke In a scene from the Book of Exodus, a follower frantically tells Moses: "Moses! What do we do?! You can't fight off all these kings!" Moses calmly replies: "Oh, they'll be parting soon."

## The Joke A child asks her father a series of increasingly advanced physics questions: "Daddy, why is the sky blue?", "Daddy, what happens if you make a gas of magnetic particles?", and "Daddy, is

## The Joke A mother explains to her daughter that elephants have been hunted by humans for ivory, so as a result, smaller and tuskless elephants have been selected for. She notes that if the trend c

## The Joke In a Scooby-Doo-style setup, a ghost that has been haunting banks is unmasked to reveal... the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. He explains that he was trying to make banks spooky and unp

## The Joke A woman evaluates potential mates through an increasingly absurd evolutionary/biological lens. She starts by considering a normal man but finds him lacking. She then considers progressive

## The Joke Two parents sit in increasingly anxious internal monologue panels. One worries: "If I don't feed her the right foods, she won't be a well-adjusted adult." The other frets: "If I don't rea

## The Joke A man is shown excitedly holding up birds and shouting "Dinosaurs! Dinosaurs!" The caption below reads: "Dad spent seven years in that sanitarium before we remembered he was a taxonomist.

## The Joke A man suggests to a woman: "I think we should have sex." The woman, standing in front of a house that is visibly on fire, responds: "But the house is on fire! Help me put out the fire fir

## The Joke A child is panicking in the passenger seat as his father nearly drives the car over a railing. When the child asks what he's doing, the father calmly replies he's "taking care of some bus

## The Joke A child asks their father what he wants them to be when they grow up. The father says he can't tell them, and explains his internal conflict through several panels: he imagines all sorts

## The Joke In a parody of Lord of the Rings, Gandalf tells Frodo that the ring must be destroyed and must be taken to Mount Doom. Frodo objects, saying he's "not tromping all that way" and that he a