Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Beauty

2021-02-19 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
Beauty
Votey panel for Beauty
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

The Joke

A person is praying and asks God: "Am I ugly?" God appears on a screen and goes through a systematic anatomical breakdown. God says "Beauty is only skin deep." Then: "Under that, it is bloody meat." God continues: "Inside the meat there are gross bones and a long tube filled with feces." Then, in a comparison: "Compared to the rest of you, the skin part looks great!"

The praying person, dismayed, says: "I feel like you are not addressing the spirit of my question." God responds: "Not even in the top 100, Jeff." -- finally answering the actual question about whether Jeff is attractive, and confirming that no, he is very much not.

The Humor

The joke works on two levels. First, there is God taking the question hyper-literally and going on a clinical anatomical tour of the human body, arguing that skin is the best-looking part of a person simply because everything underneath it (muscles, bones, a digestive tract full of waste) is far more disgusting. This is a reductio ad absurdum -- technically true but deliberately missing the point. Second, after this long philosophical dodge, God casually delivers the brutal honest answer at the very end: the person is not even in the top 100 of attractive people. The misdirection makes the final insult land even harder because the reader had begun to think God was avoiding the question entirely.

References

The phrase "beauty is only skin deep" is a well-known proverb dating back to at least the 17th century, typically used to suggest that physical appearance is superficial and character matters more. Here, God takes the proverb literally rather than figuratively, using it as a launching point for a gross anatomy lesson. The comic also plays on the trope of people praying to God for reassurance about their appearance.

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