Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

Two people decide to come up with a new fetish by spinning a "Wheel of Perversion." They spin it, but one of them realizes, "Oh shoot, one of these was a wheel of social reform movements." The two wheels have gotten mixed up. The final panel shows the result: a person saying "Taste the lash of organic hemp!" while another responds, "I feel so sustainably degraded!"

The Humor

The comic jokes about the unexpected overlap between the language of social reform movements (particularly environmentalism and sustainability) and sexual fetish subcultures. When the "Wheel of Perversion" accidentally gets swapped with the "Wheel of Social Reform Movements," the result is a perfect blend of both: organic hemp being used as a whip (hemp being an environmentally friendly material championed by sustainability advocates) and the phrase "sustainably degraded" combining ecological language ("sustainable") with BDSM terminology ("degraded").

The humor lies in how seamlessly the two vocabularies merge, suggesting that the passionate, moralistic language of social reform movements can sound surprisingly similar to the language of fetish culture when taken out of context.