Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

The comic presents a nature-documentary-style narrative about the Kauai O'o (Moho braccatus), a now-extinct Hawaiian bird. It explains that prior to the arrival of Europeans, there were four species of this genus in Hawaii. Due to introduced predators, habitat loss, hunting, and disease, they died off during the 19th and 20th centuries. The last known member of the species was a single male, observed near the end of his life singing a mating song to a female that would never come -- because there were no others left.

The comic then cuts to a man listening to a recording of this bird's final song on his phone. Moved, he reflects: "And some good morning, we may find ourselves as endangered as a single Kauai O'o, singing our song to a mateless sky." The final panel undercuts this poignant moment as the man breaks into a cartoonishly bad rendition of the song: "I'm a goooood whatever with nobody don't dieeee!" -- reducing the profound metaphor to a goofy, inarticulate howl.

The Humor

The comic sets up a genuinely moving and melancholy story about extinction and loneliness, only to deflate it with the man's terrible attempt to channel the bird's tragic dignity. The contrast between the solemnity of a species' last song and the man's garbled, self-pitying karaoke version is the core joke. It also gently mocks the human tendency to appropriate animal tragedies as metaphors for our own comparatively trivial romantic problems.

References

• The Kauai O'o (Moho braccatus) was a real Hawaiian bird; the last known individual was a male recorded singing in 1987 in the Alakai Wilderness. The species was declared extinct in 2000. Recordings of its haunting final song are available and have gone viral online as a symbol of extinction's tragedy.