Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic reinterprets the familiar sound of a crying baby. It proposes that babies are not actually saying "waaahhh!" but are instead screaming "whyyyyy!?" -- as in an existential cry questioning the nature of their sudden existence. The joke is that you cannot tell the difference because babies cannot pronounce the hard "y" sound, so both utterances sound identical.

The comic goes on to explain that babies spend their first two to three years in a state of "complete existential crisis" and "utter madness," and only once their brains are "completely empty" from exhausting themselves with philosophical despair can parents begin teaching them basic things like counting and animal noises. It is a playful inversion of how we typically view infant development -- rather than babies being blank slates gradually learning, this version imagines them arriving with too much awareness and needing to burn through it before normal childhood can begin.