Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

excuse-me-2

2024-04-04 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
You are viewing an older revision of this explanation (2026-03-14 14:57:29). View current version →
excuse-me-2
Votey panel for excuse-me-2
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

In this comic, a man approaches a couple and asks, "Excuse me, sir, could you take a quick photo of my wife and I?" The other man asks, "You mean a photo?" and the requester corrects: "No, just a quick watercolor." The second panel has the requester elaborating -- he is not asking for a photo at all but rather a painted portrait, asking the stranger to try to capture the light on his wife's hair. The stranger protests that he does not know how to paint, and the requester asks, "No formal training at all? Okay."

The joke subverts the extremely common social ritual of asking a stranger to take your photo at a tourist spot. The man initially appears to be making this ordinary request, but the word "photo" is swapped out for "watercolor," a far more demanding and skilled art form. The humor escalates as the man treats this absurd request as perfectly normal, expressing mild disappointment that the stranger lacks formal art training, as though this is a reasonable expectation of a random passerby. The comic plays on the idea of taking a mundane social interaction and replacing one element with something wildly impractical while keeping everyone's demeanor completely casual.

View History (1) Original Comic