Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A person challenges an angel by saying that the idea of heaven does not make sense. The angel explains that "human happiness tends to be relative" -- it requires us to look down on everyone else in heaven. But that is not genuine happiness. In heaven, everyone is equal and good, and "thanks to the loving grace of God, they don't feel compelled to compare themselves to others." The human protests: "That makes perfect sense."

But the twist comes in the final panels: even in heaven, the system fails. The angel admits that heaven is arranged to give people the feeling of superiority -- "it's not condescension, it's congratulations to your superior moral status" -- revealing that heaven still relies on the very same relative comparison it claimed to transcend.

The Humor

The comic satirizes the philosophical problem of whether happiness can exist without comparison. The angel initially presents a compelling theological argument for why heaven would work (God removes the impulse to compare), but then immediately undermines it by showing that heaven actually does use a form of condescension and status hierarchy. The joke is that even an omnipotent God cannot solve the human need for relative status -- heaven has to resort to the same tricks as Earth. It is a sharp commentary on hedonic adaptation and the idea that absolute happiness may be psychologically impossible for humans.

References

The comic engages with the hedonic treadmill theory from psychology (the idea that happiness is always relative to one's reference point) and the theological problem of what eternal bliss would actually feel like for beings wired for comparison and status-seeking.