Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

go

2022-08-24 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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go
Votey panel for go
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic poses a simple question — "If you had to die, how would you like to go?" — and then delivers its punchline through a newspaper headline.

A character lying in bed (presumably being asked this classic hypothetical) responds: "Well..." The next panel shows a newspaper with the headline: "MATHEMATICIAN LOVER DIES ATTEMPTING IMPOSSIBLE THEOREM" (or similar — the text describes a mathematician dying while attempting to prove an impossible theorem).

The final panel shows the character's partner responding with: "Peacefully, sleeping, of natural causes" (or a similarly mundane answer), contrasting the mathematician's grandiose death wish.

The humor comes from the gap between the two responses. One character wants a death that is dramatic, intellectually heroic, and romantically framed in a newspaper headline — dying in the pursuit of mathematical truth. The other just wants to die peacefully in their sleep. It's a joke about the kind of person who romanticizes an epic intellectual death versus the normal human preference for simply not suffering.

The title "Go" refers to the euphemism "how would you like to go?" meaning "how would you like to die?" — keeping the dark subject matter light.

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