Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

kid

2024-03-01 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
kid
Votey panel for kid
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 imagines the practical frustrations that would have accompanied the transition from the BC to AD calendar system following the birth of Jesus Christ.

A Roman-era bureaucrat or official is exasperated: "I've got to reset everything to zero? And now there's two versions of every year? All because some kid showed up? Whose idea was this?" He's complaining about the calendar change the way a modern office worker might complain about a software migration or database update -- the mundane logistical nightmare of resetting an entire dating system.

The caption below reads: "Fun Fact: early Christian persecution was largely over calendar adjustments." This is, of course, entirely false -- early Christians were persecuted for religious and political reasons -- but the joke reframes one of history's great moral tragedies as a petty bureaucratic grievance.

The humor works by anachronistically applying modern frustrations (IT system changes, version conflicts, arbitrary resets) to an ancient context. Anyone who has lived through a "we're changing our numbering system" announcement at work can relate to this man's rage. The comic suggests that if you strip away the theology and politics, the AD/BC split really was an incredibly inconvenient standards change, and maybe the Romans had a point to be annoyed about the paperwork.

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