Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic satirizes academic hypocrisy around the concept of conspicuous consumption. Two academics discuss Thorstein Veblen's 1899 theory of "conspicuous consumption" -- the idea that people spend money wastefully and publicly in order to signal social status. The woman explains the concept, and both agree that people waste effort on pointless status displays.

The punchline comes when the woman says she is glad academics do not have that sort of problem, and the man replies, "I wouldn't know. I spend all of my time reading books that are too obscure for other people." His response is itself a form of conspicuous consumption -- he is signaling his intellectual status by boasting about reading obscure material that others cannot handle. The comic highlights that academics, despite being well-versed in theories about status-seeking behavior, are just as guilty of it themselves. They simply trade expensive cars and designer clothes for intellectual one-upmanship and performative obscurantism.