Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A time traveler in futuristic armor arrives and explains to a medieval-era person that in the future, they have developed time travel and use it to "manage historical unpleasantness." The medieval person asks if the traveler has come to stop the wicked Baron from impaling everyone. The traveler says no -- instead, he is using a neuroscience device that turns the sensation of being impaled into a pleasurable experience. In other words, rather than preventing the atrocity, he has simply made the victims enjoy it. The final panel labeled "Later" shows the impaled townspeople cheerfully shouting "Hooray!" while still skewered on stakes.

The comic is a dark satire of utilitarian ethics taken to an absurd extreme. A strict utilitarian calculus says that what matters is maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering. The time traveler has found a loophole: rather than changing the events (which might have complex historical consequences), he simply eliminates the suffering component. By utilitarian math, the outcome is now positive -- the people are happy -- even though they are still being brutally impaled.

The Humor

The humor comes from the horrifying gap between what we intuitively feel is the right thing to do (stop the impaling) and what a coldly logical utilitarian framework might endorse (make the impaling feel good). The cheerful "Hooray!" from people stuck on stakes is a viscerally absurd image that highlights the limitations of pure consequentialism. SMBC often explores the ways that philosophical frameworks, taken to their logical extremes, produce conclusions that are technically consistent but deeply disturbing. The comic also pokes fun at a common criticism of utilitarianism: that it could theoretically justify any atrocity as long as the subjective experience of the people involved is positive.

References

The comic engages with utilitarian philosophy, particularly the "experience machine" thought experiment proposed by Robert Nozick in his 1974 book "Anarchy, State, and Utopia." Nozick asked whether people would choose to plug into a machine that simulates a perfect life, arguing that most would not, which challenges the utilitarian view that subjective experience is all that matters. This comic presents a similar scenario: the objective horror remains, but the subjective experience has been altered to be pleasant.