Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A child asks a woman (presumably her mother or grandmother), "Could you sing me Twinkle Twinkle Little Star?" The woman responds with an astrophysically accurate version of the nursery rhyme: "Twinkle twinkle, little star, you must be a small pulsar out way from Earth you drift. This is mag from weak red shift. Twinkle twinkle, little star, degenerate matter'''s what you are."

In the next panel, two other people react. One says, "That'''s not the version Gramma sings." The other responds, "Gramma has internalized book oppression."

The Humor

The comic satirizes two things at once. First, it mocks the tendency of scientifically-minded people to "correct" simple, charming things (like nursery rhymes) with technically accurate but joyless scientific information. The woman replaces the whimsical original lyrics with references to pulsars, redshift (a phenomenon that indicates astronomical objects are moving away from us), and degenerate matter (the ultra-dense matter found in neutron stars and white dwarfs).

Second, the punchline takes a jab at certain strands of academic or social justice language. When the child notes this isn'''t the version Gramma sings, the other person claims Gramma has "internalized book oppression" -- a parody of phrases like "internalized oppression" used in critical theory. Here the term is absurdly applied to suggest that the grandmother'''s version of the nursery rhyme is somehow the product of systemic anti-intellectual bias, rather than simply being a pleasant children'''s song.

References

• "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star": A popular English nursery rhyme, with lyrics originally from an 1806 poem by Jane Taylor.
• Pulsars: Highly magnetized rotating neutron stars that emit beams of electromagnetic radiation.
• Redshift: The phenomenon where light from an object moving away from the observer is shifted toward the red end of the spectrum, used to measure the recession velocity of distant astronomical objects.
• Degenerate matter: A highly dense state of matter found in white dwarfs and neutron stars, where quantum mechanical effects (specifically the Pauli exclusion principle) prevent further gravitational collapse.