Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic is titled "True Weinersmith Tales" and presents one of Zach Weinersmith's real-life ideas taken to a humorous extreme. The premise is that all political speeches could be improved by replacing every word except the nouns with the nonsense word "nurble." The idea is that political speeches are so formulaic and content-free that you can follow the entire meaning just from the nouns alone, with all the connecting language being essentially filler.

The comic then shows that one of Weinersmith's Twitter followers, Jeff Lee, actually wrote a PHP program called "The Political Speech Nurbler" that does exactly this -- it takes a speech as input and replaces everything except nouns with "nurble." The comic displays the actual source code of the program, which uses a parts-of-speech database to identify nouns and substitute everything else. As a test, they run it on a passage from the 2012 State of the Union address. The resulting "nurbled" passage, while mostly gibberish, still conveys the key themes of the speech through the preserved nouns: TESTAMENT, COURAGE, SELFLESSNESS, TEAMWORK, COUNTRY, WORLD, PEOPLE, FUTURE, ENERGY, SECURITY, PROSPERITY, ECONOMY, and so on.

The comic then suggests that "nurbling" could serve as a test for the information density of a speech. A character notes that the State of the Union still contained 43 non-nurbled words (nouns), suggesting that "if you can get the point entirely from two nouns per sentence, you're wasting about 90% of your time." A political figure then asks to "nurble ten of those" because he wants the speech to "play in Peoria" -- a classic political phrase meaning to appeal to mainstream America, humorously implying that even fewer nouns would be preferable.

The votey panel continues the joke with someone watching a nurbled political debate on TV, where even political insults work in nurbled form: "You nurble nurble nurble idiocy." The opponent responds with "Nurble you!" -- showing that the emotional content of political discourse survives the nurbling process perfectly intact.