Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

Two people are discussing Noah's Ark. One says she does not understand the moral of the story: "Why was the flood necessary? If all the bad people needed to die, why not just eliminate them humanely? Why drown entire departments, the old, the young, all those animals?" The other person counters that maybe God "sent a crazy guy obsessing to build a giant boat so he could rescue his wacky uncles," suggesting it was not a divine plan but a delusional individual. The first person insists modern humans "come from this man and it was not a flood" -- reinterpreting the story as just a family legend gone wrong. In the final panel, a TV is showing the "explaining" and someone says, "The explaining is too much," with the other replying, "See, doesn't this feel right? You feel it?"

The comic takes the story of Noah's Ark and subjects it to the kind of skeptical, logical scrutiny that reveals how strange the traditional narrative is when taken literally. Rather than accepting the story at face value, the characters try to construct alternative explanations that make more rational sense, each one sounding increasingly absurd.

The Humor

The humor emerges from the collision between sincere theological narrative and blunt logical analysis. The comic does not simply mock the story -- it shows that attempts to rationalize it are equally tortured. The escalating back-and-forth between the two characters, each trying to find a version of events that "makes sense," becomes its own comedy of futility. The final panel's appeal to feelings over logic ("doesn't this feel right?") satirizes how people often resolve theological debates not through evidence but through emotional intuition.