Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A man explains to a woman that up until the 1940s or so, the phrase "make love" simply meant doing romantic things like courting or flirting. Over time, it got "crowded out" by the modern meaning of "to have sex." He notes that this is cool because it retroactively makes old novels sound filthy — imagining "two Victorian characters go into a park and make love" sounds scandalous to modern ears even though the original authors meant something innocent.

The woman then suggests they can do the opposite: take modern filthy language and repurpose it to mean something wholesome, thereby making explicit media sound oddly nice. The man takes this idea to its logical conclusion and announces that from now on, he will use the F-word to describe the act of making cupcakes. The final panel jumps to "several generations hence," where a futuristic figure wonders why David Mamet's characters are so concerned with baking.

The Humor

The comedy comes from the observation that semantic drift — the way word meanings change over time — can work in both directions. If an innocent phrase like "make love" can become sexual, then theoretically a sexual word could drift toward innocence. The absurdity of deliberately trying to engineer this shift by using profanity to describe baking is the core gag. The final panel sells the joke by imagining a future where the plan actually worked, and people in the far future are genuinely confused about why 20th-century playwright David Mamet's famously profanity-laden dialogue seems to be obsessively focused on cupcakes.

The alt text ("I wonder if transitions like this always have a Most Awkward Year of usage") adds another layer, humorously imagining the uncomfortable transitional period where a word is caught between its old and new meanings.

References

David Mamet is an American playwright, screenwriter, and director known for his distinctive, profanity-heavy dialogue style. Works like Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo are famous for their liberal use of the F-word, making him the perfect reference for this joke about that word being reinterpreted as baking terminology.

The linguistic phenomenon described here is called "semantic shift" or "semantic drift," where words gradually change meaning over time. The example of "make love" shifting from courtship to sex is a real and well-documented case of this phenomenon.