Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A woman asks her partner: "Baby, would you ever cheat on me?" The partner responds: "Yes, absolutely." Shocked, the woman says "What?!" The partner then clarifies by reframing the question: "Would I ever cheat on you? Like, in the infinite space of possible behaviors I might engage in, do any of them involve cheating on you?"

The partner then lists a series of increasingly absurd and heroic scenarios: "Of course! I can think of twenty scenarios off the top of my head! I'd cheat on you to stop Hitler. I'd cheat on you to cure a baby. I'd cheat on you to end a pandemic." They continue: "Cheat on you to increase NASA's funding, cheat on you for the first room-temperature superconductor, cheat on you to bring back stegosaurus, cheat on you to--" The woman interrupts with "Okay."

The partner then asks: "I mean... are there any likely scenarios, given the available information about the near-term, in which you cheat on me?" The answer: "Never ever ever."

The Humor

The comic takes a simple loyalty question and turns it into a philosophical exercise about possibility versus probability. The partner's initial "Yes, absolutely" is technically honest when considering the infinite space of possible scenarios, but it's a wildly inappropriate way to answer what is clearly a question about realistic likelihood. The humor comes from the contrast between the emotional, relationship-oriented question the woman is asking and the hyper-rational, technically-correct-but-socially-catastrophic way the partner answers it.

The escalating list of absurd scenarios -- stopping Hitler, curing babies, ending pandemics, increasing NASA funding, achieving room-temperature superconductivity, and resurrecting dinosaurs -- makes the point that if the stakes were impossibly high, almost any action could be justified. But this completely misses the spirit of the question. The final exchange brings it back to reality: under any realistic parameters, the answer is no.

The title "Realistic Adultery Parameters" frames fidelity as an optimization problem with defined parameters, fitting SMBC's recurring theme of applying scientific and mathematical frameworks to human relationships.

References

• Room-Temperature Superconductor: A hypothetical material that would conduct electricity with zero resistance at room temperature, considered one of the holy grails of physics and materials science.
• The comic's approach mirrors philosophical thought experiments where extreme hypothetical scenarios are used to probe moral principles, such as trolley problems.