Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A news broadcast reports that a 1,000-meter-tall lizard creature has attacked New York City -- a classic Godzilla scenario. But instead of panicking, the news anchors calmly explain why this is not actually a problem. They note that given the biomechanics of the creature and the square-cube law, its legs cannot support its weight. They explain that the creature's body is composed almost entirely of legs, which were not able to move at a dangerous speed. They also explain that despite local population density, people were easily able to avoid it because of how slowly it moved. Then a different expert dismisses the whole event, noting that popular science fiction has always gotten science wrong and that "no fun, because light doesn't work that way." The final panel cuts to a live reporter at a liquor store, saying "there's no fun, because light doesn't work that way."

The Humor

The comic satirizes the tendency of scientifically-minded people (and science communicators) to suck the fun out of exciting scenarios by pointing out why they are physically impossible. When a giant monster attacks a city, the "correct" response from a physicist is to explain that the square-cube law means such a creature could never support its own weight, that its legs would need to be impossibly thick, and that it could not move fast enough to be dangerous. While technically accurate, this completely misses the point of the emergency. The comic lampoons the "well actually" impulse in science communication -- the people who, when presented with a thrilling or terrifying fictional scenario, feel compelled to explain why it could never really happen rather than engaging with the spectacle. The final panel about light not working "that way" extends the joke to suggest these killjoys will debunk literally everything.

References

• The square-cube law, first described by Galileo, states that as an object's size increases, its volume grows faster than its surface area, meaning that a scaled-up animal would collapse under its own weight. This is a classic physics objection to giant movie monsters.
• Godzilla (Gojira) is the iconic giant monster from the 1954 Japanese film and its many sequels. Gojirasaurus is also a real (though disputed) genus of dinosaur named after Godzilla.
• The comic's title "Gojirasaurus" is a play on the Japanese name for Godzilla ("Gojira").