Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Time Stop

2021-05-11 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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Time Stop
Votey panel for Time Stop
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 Joke

A person says they would stop time if they could have any superpower. Their friend objects that "time-stopping doesn't make sense" — if time stops, photons would stop moving so you'd be blind, air molecules would be held in place so you couldn't breathe, and your body would have to push through trillions of frozen particles "like tiny needles."

The first person protests: "I mean like, everyone perceives time as stopped but I can still walk around." The friend responds: "That's not actually time-stopping, that's just freezing other people." The person then admits: "You're conflating humanity's mental experience of time with the physical quantity." Their friend asks what they would actually do with this power, and the person confesses: "What I would do is go to a bunch of places and also steal stuff."

The Humor

The comic starts as a physics-pedantry joke, with one character deconstructing the popular "stop time" superpower fantasy by pointing out all the physical impossibilities. But the real punchline is the deflation at the end: after all the intellectual debate about the nature of time, physics, and perception, the person's actual desire is mundanely criminal — they just want to steal things and snoop around. The comic satirizes how people dress up selfish impulses in grandiose sci-fi language, and also pokes fun at the pedantic "well actually" style of deconstructing fictional superpowers.

View History (1) Original Comic