Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Candyland

2020-08-22 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
Candyland
Votey panel for Candyland
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 frustrated man stands in what appears to be a board game store in Hell. He's ranting: "I don't get it. It's all just Candyland! Don't they have anything else? The whole damn store! The whole store sells nothing but Candyland!" The shelves behind him are filled entirely with copies of Candyland, with no other games available.

The caption at the bottom reads: "The good news is they have boardgames in Hell." The joke is a classic "good news/bad news" setup -- the good news is that Hell has board games, but the bad news is that the only game available is Candyland, a children's game widely regarded as one of the most tedious board games ever made because it involves zero strategy or decision-making (players simply draw cards and follow instructions).

The Humor

Candyland is the perfect choice for a Hell-themed punishment because it occupies a unique place in board game culture: it's technically a "game," but it has no meaningful choices. The outcome is entirely predetermined by the order of the cards. For anyone who enjoys board games, being forced to play nothing but Candyland for eternity would indeed be a fitting torment. The humor also works because it's a very specific, mundane form of eternal punishment -- not fire and brimstone, but the slow, soul-crushing tedium of a children's game with no strategic depth. This fits SMBC's recurring theme of reimagining the afterlife with absurdly bureaucratic or banal punishments.

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