Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

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2026-02-26 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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Votey panel for artist
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic features a conversation between a young person and their grandpa about sex and aging, specifically parodying the "pickup artist" (PUA) culture.

In the first panel, the young person mentions that there are "these guys online that teach strategy for getting the most girls." The grandpa dismissively responds: "Amateurs."

What follows is the grandpa's increasingly graphic and disturbing description of what sex is like for elderly people. He asks rhetorically what it's like to "make your 70-year-old wife come home plastered from wine and bingo night," explains that "it takes 40 years of marriage to receive properly" and describes their encounters with hilariously grotesque imagery -- bodies so "gloppy" that anything could be anything, and a climax described in terms of cosmic violence.

The younger characters are visibly horrified and disturbed throughout. One says "I'll never look at Grammy the same way." The grandpa and grandma, shown in the final panel, note that "we don't make a lot of eye contact anymore. Yeah."

The humor works on multiple levels. First, it subverts the PUA culture by having an elderly man claim mastery over something the young "pickup artists" are trying to learn, but his version is so thoroughly unappealing that it undercuts the whole endeavor. Second, it mines comedy from the universal discomfort people feel when confronted with the reality that elderly people (especially one's own grandparents) have sex lives. Third, the grandpa's descriptions are so over-the-top and poetic in their grotesqueness that they become absurdist comedy.

The final panel serves as a deflating coda -- the grandparents' avoidance of eye contact suggests that the grandpa's epic descriptions may be more fantasy than reality, or that the reality is even more awkward than advertised.

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