Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A mad scientist is giving a tour of his lab, which looks "pretty empty." He explains that he just got his PhD in mad science and a little mad science lab space, but startup money was low. The national mad science fund is "pretty strapped right now" and did not do enough youth outreach in mad grad school, so his is not a top-tier institution. He is working on a grant application, noting that his last one was rejected because he "used the wrong margin size." If this one gets past all three stages, and if there is enough money and his university gets its cut, he can finally do some work. His visitors react: "My god... the bureaucracy."

The Humor

The comic satirizes the real-world struggles of academic researchers by applying them to the absurd context of "mad science." Every frustration described is painfully familiar to actual scientists: underfunded labs, bare-bones startup packages, depleted federal funding agencies, grant applications rejected for trivial formatting errors, multi-stage review processes, universities taking large overhead cuts from grants, and stifling bureaucracy.

The humor lies in the juxtaposition: we expect a mad scientist to be a dramatic figure building doomsday devices and cackling maniacally, but instead he is dealing with the same mundane institutional obstacles that plague real academics. The punchline -- "My god... the bureaucracy" -- suggests that the true horror is not mad science itself but the soul-crushing administrative apparatus surrounding modern research. The implication is that even if you want to do something as exciting as mad science, the system will grind you down with paperwork and budget constraints.

References

The comic references the common experience of academic scientists in the United States, where federal research funding (e.g., from the National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health) is highly competitive, grant applications are notoriously complex, and universities typically claim a significant portion of grant money as "indirect costs" or overhead.