Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic satirizes government surveillance and secrecy. A politician with an American flag pin makes a series of statements: first, "We need to know what you're doing in order to protect you." Then,

This comic plays on the gap between what seems like deep emotional mystery and a much more mundane reality. In the top panel, a woman asks her partner Jon why she sometimes finds him staring into the

This comic takes the common business slogan "The customer is always right" to its logical extreme. A mathematician sees a sign for "Porky's Diner" that reads "Where the customer is always right." He r

This comic depicts a schoolyard bullying scenario with a computer science twist. A bully grabs a smaller kid and demands, "Gimme all your lunch money!" The victim replies, "I have money, but it's for

This comic is a dark joke set in the Harry Potter universe. Two silhouetted figures enter a room that appears to belong to Harry. One exclaims, "Oh GOD it stinks in here!" while the other says, "You'd

This comic satirizes arguments about artificial intelligence safety. In the first panel, a researcher at a podium declares, "For those who question my AI research and its risks, I tell you: there is n

This comic tells the story of parents who try to solve the problem of their young daughter walking in on them during intimate moments. The narration explains: "Our girl kept walking in on us having se

This comic is titled "Everyone's Brain is a Dorian Grey" (referencing Oscar Wilde's novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray"). In the first panel, a man scolds a woman: "You can't spend your whole life read

This comic features two women in a relationship who get trapped in a logical paradox. One says, "I think you're the best, baby," and the other replies, "I think YOU're the best." This triggers a chain

This comic riffs on the well-known aphorism often attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt: "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." The comic presents three tiers

This comic is titled "Why You Dont Want an Economist to Be President." It shows a woman at a presidential podium (with a flag behind her) making a speech. She announces that every single person, excep

This comic features two aliens in space observing Earth and discussing humanity. The first alien remarks on how strange humans are: they live for less than 100 years, yet they find time to tell jokes,

This comic imagines Dr. Seuss having a terrible domestic life, as stated in the caption at the bottom. A woman (presumably his wife) says "Oh come on. Another book of verse?" Dr. Seuss (depicted with

This comic depicts a philosophical debate about the driving forces of history, personified as two arguing figures. A golden crown labeled "Great People" declares "Im the most important driver of histo

This comic reimagines a scene from "Alices Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll. In the first panel, the White Rabbit reports to the Queen of Hearts that there is an intruder in Wonderland. The

This comic depicts a corporate meeting around a conference table, apparently at a frozen pizza company. One person announces that their focus groups have finally settled on the slogan "Have a Party at

This comic is titled "Personal Deficiency + Stats Knowledge = Super Powers." It shows a person dressed as a superhero (complete with mask and cape) bursting into a room full of people and triumphantly

This comic is titled "Watching Alien After Pregnancy." It shows a couple sitting on a couch watching the classic 1979 sci-fi horror film "Alien." The man is visibly disturbed, saying "Oh God!" while t

This comic illustrates how proton interactions work using an analogy to socially awkward romance. In the first two tiers, two protons (drawn as orange circles with "+" signs) are shown at a distance,

## The Joke Scientists detect an asteroid heading toward Earth. They announce the threat and propose solutions. Instead of uniting to address the existential threat, humanity immediately begins argui

This comic tackles the classic theological Problem of Evil -- the question of how evil can exist if God is all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful. A bespectacled man poses this famous philosophical c

This comic is a sweet but ultimately self-defeating bedtime scene between a father and his young son. The father, reading a book to the boy at bedtime, tells him he wants him to imagine and dream big,

This comic, titled "How Internet Fighting Works," is an infographic-style explanation of why online arguments between groups tend to devolve so badly. It uses colored shapes (a green square group and

This comic depicts a couple's argument as a bizarre escalation of "taking things back." It begins with the woman saying she takes back all the bad things she ever said about the man. He agrees, but on

This comic presents a mathematical equation as something scarier than global warming models. The setup has two people talking: one says "Jeez... global warming models are the scariest equations in the

This comic takes place at the "89th Annual Legion of Supervillains Symposium." A supervillain named Pterrordactyl has just finished presenting his plan to detonate a dirty bomb over London. The modera

This comic is a four-panel strip featuring a robot breaking up with a human woman named Cheryl. The robot announces: "I am sorry. We can no longer be together. I am incapable of love." Cheryl, rather

This comic depicts a couple in bed where the man asks the woman to "talk mathy to me," revealing it's his fetish. The woman starts with Euler's identity (e^(i*pi) = -1), but the man dismisses it as to

This comic plays on the ambiguity of the phrase "use a condom." A teenager angrily tells her mother: "I don't KNOW how I got pregnant! You told me to use a condom if I want sex, AND I DID!" The flashb

This comic presents a satirical future history of humanity's downfall, driven entirely by the internet's obsession with cats. It begins with the premise that "the big money on the internet was in cats

This comic plays on the classic relationship phrase "I'''d like to see other people." A bespectacled man in a pink shirt tells his red-haired girlfriend that he'''d like to see other people, but then

This comic is about the social awkwardness of taking polite offers too literally. A host welcomes a guest into his home, saying "Make yourself at home. You can have anything in the fridge." The guest,

This comic tackles the trolley problem -- a famous thought experiment in ethics -- but takes it to an absurd extreme through the lens of neuroethics. A woman poses the classic dilemma: you'''re on an

This comic satirizes the concept of the technological singularity and the "intelligence explosion" -- the idea that once we create an AI smarter than ourselves, it will create an even smarter AI, whic

This comic is titled "How to Destroy a Math Class in One Question" and presents a self-referential graph problem. The setup is a test question worth 100 points that asks students to "fill in this grap

This comic is one of SMBC'''s more poignant and philosophical entries. Two children are lying outside under the stars, and one tells the other that his uncle is "going crazy." He explains that his unc

This comic features a child using mathematical reasoning to try to game the birthday-present system. The child exclaims "Daddy! It'''s approximately my birthday!" The father, rather than dismissing th

This comic imagines Stonehenge as the set of an ancient game show. A robed host with a scepter addresses a contestant named "Cuidightheach" (a pseudo-Celtic name), telling him he has ten choices: behi

This comic takes a real neuroscience observation -- that the brain'''s disgust centers become less active during sexual arousal -- and extrapolates it to an absurd political scenario. A scientist expl

This comic imagines an app called "Conception Connection" that calculates the approximate date of your conception from your birthday, then cross-references it with historical events to determine what

This comic takes the common expression "you can'''t compare apples to oranges" and imagines a scientist who has literally solved the problem by genetically engineering a hybrid fruit called the "orapp

A time traveler triumphantly announces that he went back in time and assassinated "Hartler" before he came to power. His companion asks, "You mean Hitler?" The time traveler responds, "No. Who's Hitle

This comic features a woman delivering a grandiose philosophical monologue to her roommate about the miracle of consciousness. She begins by noting that "you are a mind" and that minds make up an infi

The comic is titled "How to get a physicist to date you" and shows a woman telling a man: "I want you. By symmetry, we can predict that you want me." The physicist responds with evident temptation: "T

This comic juxtaposes the famous poem "They Flee from Me" by Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, a 16th-century English poet, with an absurd sci-fi scenario. In the first panel, a man dressed in Tudor-era clo

This comic is a votey-style single panel showing an older woman saying "Anal." with a caption below reading "Hey, remember that time your mom thought she'd found a simple solution to the 3 body proble

In this comic, a mother is shown explaining to her child the answer to the classic joke "Why did the chicken cross the road?" But instead of the traditional punchline ("To get to the other side"), she

This comic features a child asking their mother "Mommy, what's a 'size zero'?" The mother explains that size zero is a term for women's clothing sizes, which have to do with the circumference of the w

This comic follows Superman saving a man who was attempting suicide by jumping off a building. After being caught, the man says he suddenly feels like he has "a new lease on life" and declares he's go

## The Joke A philosophy student presents the classic Problem of Evil to God: if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent, why does evil exist? God's response is not a sophisticated theodicy but