Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

summit

2023-05-18 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
summit
Votey panel for summit
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

The comic is a simple two-panel joke about misleading measurements. A man brags to a woman: "Climbing. Yeah, I'm into it. Last summit was 30 football fields in height." The woman is visibly impressed, responding "Wowwww."

The punchline appears in the caption below: "Conversation tip: football fields are zero centimeters tall."

The joke hinges on the common practice of using football fields as a unit of measurement for length (about 100 yards or 91 meters). The man exploits the fact that people instinctively associate "football fields" with a large measurement, but he specifies "in height" - and a football field is flat, so its height is essentially zero. Thirty times zero is still zero. The comic satirizes how people use impressive-sounding but meaningless metrics to inflate their accomplishments, and how listeners often fail to scrutinize the actual meaning behind comparative measurements. It is also a dig at the American habit of measuring things in football fields rather than standard units.

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