Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

In the first panel, an old bearded man (Noah) is frantically talking on the phone, saying he needs to buy up as many flood insurance policies as he can, and he needs them right now. He then nervously adds, "...No... How could I possibly have insider information on the weather?"

The second panel, labeled "Earlier...," shows the same man standing in a desert landscape as a glowing divine presence (God) commands him: "Noah! Build an ark!" This reveals that Noah has indeed received insider information -- directly from God -- that a catastrophic flood is coming, and he is trying to profit from it by buying flood insurance before the deluge.

The Humor

The comic reimagines the biblical story of Noah and the Great Flood through a modern financial lens. Rather than focusing on the moral or spiritual aspects of the story, it treats God's warning to Noah as the ultimate insider tip -- literally divine insider information about an upcoming catastrophe. Noah's attempt to buy massive amounts of flood insurance before the flood is essentially insider trading applied to the insurance market. The humor comes from the collision of sacred scripture with white-collar financial crime, and Noah's transparently guilty denial that he could possibly have insider information on the weather, when he has literally just been told by the omniscient creator of the universe exactly what is about to happen.

References

The comic references the story of Noah's Ark from the Book of Genesis (chapters 6-9), in which God warns Noah of an impending global flood and instructs him to build a large vessel to save his family and pairs of every animal species. It also references the concept of insider trading, where someone trades on material, non-public information -- in this case, applied to the insurance market rather than the stock market.