Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A man tells his friend that years ago, he made a promise to his dying father that he would destroy his father's porn stash if he ever died. The friend notes that his father's porn was being streamed from cloud-based services -- meaning it cannot simply be destroyed by, say, burning a box of magazines. The man then reveals the result: he built a man-made EMP (electromagnetic pulse) device, and the next panel shows a computer screen displaying "para-Site" and "the server has gone dark." He has destroyed the entire server infrastructure.

The punchline comes in the final panel, where another character holds up a burning computer and declares, "This is the most incredible moral story I've ever read." When asked to explain, they say it is "basically Moby Dick, but with so many more destroyed servers." The joke is that the man's single-minded, monomaniacal quest to fulfill a deathbed promise to destroy his father's pornography collection led him to wage a catastrophic war against internet infrastructure itself -- a quest so absurdly epic in scope that it reads like great literature.

The Humor

The humor works on multiple levels. First, there is the relatable embarrassment of a parent's hidden pornography, escalated to an absurd extreme by modern technology (you cannot just throw away cloud-hosted content). Second, the comic parodies the classic literary structure of an obsessive quest narrative -- comparing the destruction of porn servers to Captain Ahab's pursuit of the white whale in "Moby Dick." The comparison is both ridiculous and oddly fitting, since both stories involve a man destroying everything around him in pursuit of a deeply personal, arguably pointless goal.

References

"Moby Dick" by Herman Melville (1851) is the referenced novel -- a story about Captain Ahab's monomaniacal, self-destructive quest to kill a white whale. The comic draws a parallel between Ahab's obsession and the protagonist's obsession with fulfilling a deathbed promise, both of which result in massive collateral damage.