Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

This comic depicts a conversation between two people about a cryogenically frozen person from the past who has been revived in a far-future civilization. The future people are excited to learn about this ancient human, noting his physical features with amazement -- "He has eyes!" and "His face is open." They marvel at this historical figure the way modern scientists might study a prehistoric human. The humor escalates as the conversation turns to what the ancient people left behind as cultural artifacts.

The future scholars explain they have used "ancient algorithms" to determine that all of humanity's recorded visual art was apparently pornographic in nature. The revived man protests, trying to explain the nuances of human civilization -- mentioning art, culture, and the Baroque movement -- but the future people keep interpreting everything through a pornographic lens. When he mentions the Baroque period, they dismiss it. The scholars reveal they have reconstructed the entirety of human artistic output and concluded it was "all magazines," and the man's desperate attempts to correct them are brushed aside. The final punchline lands when the future people ask him to tell them about his world, and he realizes the absurdity of trying to explain human civilization to beings who have already decided everything was pornography.

The Humor

The comic satirizes the way archaeologists and historians interpret ancient civilizations through limited and often biased evidence. Just as modern scholars sometimes misinterpret ancient artifacts and assign them ritual or sexual significance -- a common criticism of pop archaeology -- this future civilization has concluded that ALL of human culture was pornographic. The joke plays on the idea that if future beings only had fragmentary evidence of our digital age, they might reasonably conclude that the internet, and by extension all of humanity, was primarily devoted to adult content. It is a wry commentary on both the limitations of historical reconstruction and the outsized role of pornography in modern digital culture.

References

The mention of the "Baroque" period references the ornate European art movement of the 17th and 18th centuries, which prominently featured nude figures in paintings and sculptures, making the future scholars' confusion darkly plausible. The comic also alludes to the common archaeological trope of labeling any unidentified artifact as having "ritual significance."