Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

compete

2025-01-16 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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compete
Votey panel for compete
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Explanation

This comic imagines an Olympic medal ceremony in a world where cloning is possible. An announcer stands at the podium declaring that "this gold medal" goes to a clone designated DAVE-42956-R1-1, noting "with confidence that those who lost to him had no advantage, either from God or design, and thus were objectively worse, physically, mentally, and spiritually" than the winner -- on "all of you but DAVE-42956-R1-1."

The caption reads: "The Olympic Games got a lot more fair once they only allowed clones."

The joke plays on the concept of fairness in athletic competition. A persistent debate in sports is the role of genetic advantages -- some athletes are simply born with bodies better suited for their events, raising questions about whether competition is truly "fair." The comic takes this concern to its absurd logical extreme: the only way to guarantee a perfectly level playing field is to have everyone be genetically identical clones of the same person. Of course, this "solution" is ridiculous, and the result is arguably even more absurd than the original problem -- the announcer smugly declares the losers "objectively worse" in every dimension, which is hilariously harsh given they are all the same person. The humor also comes from the idea that even among perfect clones, someone still wins and someone still loses, and the system still produces the same brutal competitive hierarchy it was designed to eliminate.

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