Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A woman is telling a man about her stage fright. She explains that she is nervous about going on stage to read from her book because she always feels like nobody actually wants to be there or wants to see her. The man offers what he considers a clever solution: "You wanna know a trick? Just pretend everybody in the audience is naked."

In the final panel, we see the result of this advice -- the woman is on stage looking at a completely empty auditorium. She says "Shorty?" and the man, sitting alone in the empty theater, responds "I don't see the problem." The joke is that the classic "imagine the audience naked" tip for stage fright has been taken to its logical extreme: if you are worried no one wants to see you, imagining them naked does not help -- because the real problem is that there is literally no audience. The advice is useless because the fear was not about nervousness in front of a crowd, but about whether anyone would show up at all.

The man's obliviousness in saying "I don't see the problem" adds another layer: he is sitting in an empty theater, having told her to imagine people naked, and does not even recognize that the absence of an audience is the actual issue.

The Humor

The comic subverts the classic public-speaking tip of imagining the audience naked by applying it to a situation where it is completely irrelevant. The woman's anxiety was never about performing in front of people -- it was about whether anyone would come at all. The visual punchline of the empty theater drives this home perfectly. The man's clueless response that he does not see the problem adds a second comedic beat, highlighting his total failure to understand the nature of her fear.