Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

The comic proposes a "Literary Turing Test" to determine whether a nonfiction book should have been a paragraph instead of a full book. The procedure works like this: take 100 people and divide them into groups A, B, and C. Group A reads the full book. Group B reads a one-paragraph summary. Group C reads nothing. Then each group member is paired with someone from another group, and they interrogate each other through a screen (like a Turing test) to determine which group the other person belongs to. If more than two-thirds of the time people cannot reliably tell who read the book versus who only read the summary, then the book "should've been a paragraph."

The final panels show that the test has been applied, and the results indicate that a book titled something like "Especially Undersized Epistles in History" fails the test -- suggesting that the book's content could indeed have been conveyed in a single paragraph. The punchline panel shows a committee reviewing the results with apparent satisfaction.

The Humor

This comic skewers a common complaint about nonfiction publishing: that many books, particularly in the popular nonfiction and business book genres, contain about one paragraph's worth of actual insight padded out to 250+ pages to justify a book-length publication. Weinersmith formalizes this complaint as a rigorous scientific protocol, which is inherently funny because it applies the formality of experimental design to what is essentially the frustration of reading a bloated book. The reference to the Turing test -- originally designed to determine whether a machine can exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from a human -- adds an extra layer of nerd humor by repurposing a famous computer science concept for literary criticism.

References

The Turing test was proposed by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." The original test involves a human interrogator trying to distinguish between a human and a machine through text-based conversation. The comic adapts this framework to distinguish between someone who read an entire book and someone who only read a summary -- with the implication that if you can't tell the difference, the book was unnecessarily long.