Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Prayer

2020-11-17 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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Prayer
Votey panel for Prayer
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 woman is praying, asking God (or possibly Satan, as the punchline reveals) to send a vaccine for the pestilence ravaging the land. God responds from above, seemingly annoyed: "There is literally a pestilence upon the land. You got blood coming out of people, plagues of people dying, the weirdos of loved ones, and then you wanna -- you want me to fix pestilence?" The woman then asks why the good people are going to die. God explains that good and bad people will both die because "they're connected to all the same body of things" and that even though he could theoretically save them, "I look through infinite infinity of space and time" and both groups are affected.

The key punchline comes when the woman asks God a mathematical question about infinities and God gets confused, unable to properly handle the arithmetic of adding and subtracting infinities. The woman then announces, "Would you please excuse me a moment? I can pray to Satan" -- implying that God's inability to do transfinite arithmetic makes Satan a more competent deity to petition.

The Humor

The comic humorously portrays God as someone who is overwhelmed by his own creation and cannot handle the mathematical complexities of infinity -- despite presumably being an infinite being himself. The escalation from a sincere prayer about plague relief to a technical complaint about God's mathematical competence is absurd and unexpected. The final joke -- that the woman would rather pray to Satan because at least Satan might understand basic math -- is a wonderfully irreverent punchline that undercuts the entire theological framework of prayer.

References

The comic likely references real-world pandemic concerns (given its November 2020 publication date during the COVID-19 pandemic and the mention of vaccines). The mathematical issue about adding and subtracting infinities references a genuine concept in mathematics -- operations with infinite quantities are not straightforward and require careful treatment through set theory and transfinite arithmetic, as developed by Georg Cantor.

View History (1) Original Comic