Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

## The Joke In a corporate boardroom meeting, executives discuss a problem: "People just aren't buying cheap vodka any more." They ask: "We need to go upscale without spending any more on production.

## The Joke A bespectacled man declares to another person: "Technically, if you go by the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols, the 'ea' there is pronounced 'i'." Below the comic panel is a capti

## The Joke A boss announces to employees: "We are announcing that henceforth Fridays will be causal." An employee asks, "Don't you mean casual?" The boss clarifies: "No. On Fridays, effects will fol

## The Joke A man (dressed as a stage magician) narrates his relationship with his wife using magic as a metaphor. He says he once thought their mutual loathing had appeared "suddenly, like magic." B

## The Joke The comic presents a version of the famous "trolley problem" in ethics, but with Hitlers. A professor explains: "Suppose you're in an out-of-control train. The tracks path forks and you c

## The Joke A man wakes up feeling terrible and decides to wear his "lucky pants" for the day. The next panels show him walking through a city at night and then being hit by a city bus. The final pan

## The Joke The comic depicts a group of cavemen-like characters debating about the fundamental nature of reality, mirroring the history of physics and philosophy. The progression goes: - "Big rock

## The Joke The comic presents a variation on the classic trolley problem from moral philosophy. In the standard version, you must choose whether to divert a trolley to kill one person instead of fiv

## The Joke The comic is titled "There were some unexpected downsides to immortality." It shows a job interview scene where the interviewer tells the applicant: "Sorry, we're looking for someone with

## The Joke The comic presents three different philosophical approaches to the problem of people believing in astrology (and similar pseudoscience): 1. **The Optimist** says: "If we educate people e

## The Joke The comic imagines what it would be like if Popular Science magazine bought out Cosmopolitan (a women's lifestyle/fashion magazine). The result is a series of tips that blend Cosmo's sign

## The Joke Friedrich Nietzsche, depicted with his iconic mustache and glasses, is dogsitting. He solemnly announces: "Dog is fed." The woman responds: "Why does it sound so serious when you say it?"

## The Joke Captain Ahab (from Moby-Dick) asks "Hast seen the white whale?" A sailor checks his phone and shows him GPS coordinates and what appears to be a coupon or deal notification: "Fire Harpoon

## The Joke An older woman is giving a presentation about why investment in space research is good for society -- it could lead to discoveries in materials science, or help us observe climate change.

## The Joke A conversation takes place about the Broken Windows theory of policing. One person explains that the idea -- that cracking down on minor crimes like broken windows reduces overall crime -

## The Joke An alien tells a human couple that it must be strange for humans, who live for about a thousand years, to meet aliens that only live for sixteen hours. The humans correct the alien: they

## The Joke A woman confronts the architect of a building, asking why it looks like a "giant heartless cube of concrete." The architect explains that the building symbolizes disaffection and anomie i

## The Joke Two aliens discuss Schrodinger's Cat with a human. The human explains that due to the quantum nature of a system, a cat can be both alive and dead at once until you observe it, and asks h

## The Joke A bald villain in a lab coat announces that he has captured every single affluent white college student, and with every passing second he conducts more opinion surveys. He has amassed eno

## The Joke A man recalls that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. He reasons that this means he can determine the distance to God simply by praying and waiting for a response.

## The Joke The comic is a graph with two curves plotted against "Knowledge of Magnets" on the x-axis. The red curve represents "Great Ideas for a Perpetual Motion Machine" and the blue curve represe

## The Joke This is a long-form comic that satirizes the entire enterprise of political punditry and prediction. The comic presents a detailed critique of how political commentators make predictions,

## The Joke A man prays to God: "Dear God, why do bad things happen to good people?" God asks, "What do you mean?" The man explains: "Like, people are good, but then good things don't happen to them.

## The Joke A little girl asks her mother why her oldest brother is named Neil. The mother explains it is because Neil Armstrong was the first person out of the Apollo 11 lunar lander. The girl then

## The Joke Two people go through the classic "high five" routine: "High five!" then "On the side!" then "Down low!" followed by the prankster pulling their hand away at the last second: "Too slow!"

## The Joke A father is looking at an empty room and cheerfully says, "Wow! Our little guy sure loves that Halloween costume! He has been dressed as a ninja ever since!" The caption below reads: "Ho

## The Joke A man suggests to a woman that they carpool to work to save gas money. The woman responds with dripping sarcasm: "Oh ha ha. Yeah, right. And the stars will just keep on burning forever."

## The Joke A woman asks a man why he buys her a dozen roses every Valentine's Day. He says it is to show how much he loves her. She then applies economic reasoning: real wages in their income bracke

## The Joke A woman at a computer is making the philosophical argument that "you cannot prove reality was not created five seconds ago" -- a reference to the "Last Thursdayism" or "Omphalos hypothesi

## The Joke A parent observes that the longer they are a parent, the more adults seem like babies with a greater capacity for evil. This sets up a series of panels demonstrating the point. In the fi

## The Joke An alien explains to humans that about 500,000 years ago, its species discovered humanity and found them too violent. So they modified human minds so that humans could not imagine themsel

## The Joke A narrator explains the biological concept of "handicapping" -- where animals do something very difficult that does not improve survival in order to honestly signal their genetic quality

## The Joke A couple is in bed together. One partner says, "Nope. Elbow in the ear isn't sexy." The other (wearing glasses, clearly a theoretical physicist) enthusiastically responds, "I've got a sol

## The Joke The comic retells the nursery rhyme "Jack Sprat could eat no fat / His wife could eat no lean" but adds a scientific twist: "These traits were autosomal dominant." A Punnett square shows

## The Joke A woman asks her physicist friend to explain, in layman's terms, why bubbles in a soda go to the top, fall down, bounce exactly once, then rise again. The physicist starts to answer, "Wel

## The Joke A scientist gives a presentation about whether natural altruism exists. She says she spent many hours doing research, knowing full well it would have no noticeable benefit for her career.

## The Joke The comic presents a "Linguistic Fun Fact" stating that "virgin" can refer to any part of the body that hasn't yet been used for sex. A couple is in bed together, and the man nervously co

## The Joke The comic presents a fictional alternate history where information replaces money as the currency of modern life. The formula is V = r * e * p (value equals rarity times exclusiveness tim

## The Joke The comic is titled "Conversation Trick: Insults That Sound Like Compliments." A woman asks a man what he thought of her book manuscript. He enthusiastically replies, "It read just as goo

## The Joke A parent is confronted by two children -- one real and one a robot duplicate. The real child says the robot is trying to replace him. The parent cannot tell which is which. One child desc

## The Joke A child excitedly tells his father that he loves Brontosaurus the most -- even more than his own daddy. In the next panel, labeled "Later...", a scientist at a podium announces that the s

## The Joke The comic is titled "An Elephant Never Forgets" and shows an elephant being used as a data storage service -- because elephants famously "never forget." The elephant stands on a stage adv

## The Joke A person in what appears to be a therapy session encounters a floating puppet-like figure who introduces itself as the physical embodiment of the person'''s self-perception. The person is

## The Joke A teacher presents a mathematical induction argument to prove that "all people are special." The setup: suppose you have a set containing one person -- clearly that person is special. Now

## The Joke A romantic scene: the sun is setting over the ocean, and a woman asks a man to tell her the three words every woman longs to hear. Instead of saying "I love you," the man exclaims "Cheese

## The Joke The comic is titled "Teaching Prank #1618033: Start an Analogy Then Leave." A professor stands in front of a chalkboard and tells the class to "imagine simple harmonic motion as a horde o

## The Joke A father sits in the dark telling his kids that he always assumed by this age he would know what he was doing, but it turns out life is "a total clusterfuck." He confesses he does not kno

## The Joke Aliens arrive on Earth with a dramatic speech about how they come from a distant planet, how they once conquered the galaxy but now regret the damage they caused, and how they wish to rep

## The Joke A child excitedly tells her father that there is a doorway in the closet to another world (echoing the premise of C.S. Lewis'''s "The Chronicles of Narnia"). The father declares this incr

## The Joke Two people are discussing technology and superpowers. One observes that all the powers possessed by comic book superheroes will eventually be available to regular humans through technolog