Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

The comic shows a series of intentionally misleading graphs: truncated y-axes that make small differences look huge, cherry-picked time ranges that support whatever narrative you want, dual y-axes that create spurious-looking correlations, and other common techniques used to lie with data visualization.

The Humor

The humor is educational — the comic is essentially a crash course in how to detect graph manipulation, delivered as comedy. Each misleading graph is funny because it demonstrates how easy it is to make data say whatever you want if you control the visualization. The implicit point is that statistical literacy should include "graph literacy."

Context

Misleading graphs are a staple of political campaigns, corporate presentations, and cable news. Edward Tufte's classic book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information covers many of these techniques. The comic serves as a compact, memorable version of that lesson.