Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic features a father (or grandfather) attempting to impart wisdom to a young boy using the famous George Santayana quote: "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it." The child takes this literally and logically deconstructs it. He reasons: if we don't study history, bad things happen because we won't see what's coming. The father agrees. But then the child points out the paradox: if we DO study history, we aren't doomed to repeat it, which means studying it was a waste of time in the first place since the threat is neutralized. The father, stumped by this logical trap, says he'll have to ask the boy's mother for a better truism. The mother arrives and offers a revised version: "Those who do not study history get smacked."

The humor works on multiple levels. First, there's the child's precocious logical dismantling of a well-known aphorism, exposing a genuine paradox in the saying (it's self-defeating if it actually works). Second, the father's inability to counter the argument shows the limits of relying on canned wisdom. Third, the mother's pragmatic replacement truism -- threatening physical consequences for not studying -- is funny because it bypasses philosophy entirely in favor of simple parental authority, which turns out to be far more effective motivation.

The votey has the child asking "How do you know?" and the mother replying "Remember the last time you didn't study history?" -- a callback that itself uses historical precedent (the child's own past experience of being smacked) to justify the new truism, making it logically airtight in a way the original never was.