Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

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2018-06-15 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

The Joke

A child asks their grandmother why she is inventing a way to convert coal into steam power. The grandmother, drawn to look like an imposing Victorian-era figure, replies matter-of-factly: "Everyone must have warm showers. EVERYONE! Even nature herself!" The caption beneath reads: "No one will ever believe the true cause of global warming."

The comic presents an absurd alternate history in which global warming was not an unintended consequence of industrialization, but was instead deliberately caused by an overly zealous grandmother who was determined that absolutely everyone -- including the natural world itself -- should enjoy warm showers. The joke inverts the standard narrative of climate change as a tragic byproduct of progress and reframes it as the result of one person's aggressively wholesome insistence on universal hygiene.

The Humor

The humor works on multiple levels. First, there is the absurdity of attributing one of humanity's greatest existential challenges to a grandmother's insistence on warm showers. Second, there is the dark irony in the grandmother's seemingly benevolent motivation -- she wants everyone to be comfortable -- leading to planetary catastrophe. The joke also plays on the trope of grandmothers being unstoppable forces of domestic care, taken to a literally world-altering extreme.

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