Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

waa

2025-07-14 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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waa
Votey panel for waa
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Explanation

This comic imagines a scene from the infancy of Jesus Christ. Baby Jesus is crying loudly ("NWAAAAAAAA!") in the middle of the night while Mary (or another parent figure) desperately pleads: "Why?! Why do you cry all night?! Go to sleep!" Baby Jesus responds: "GOD DOES NOT REQUIRE SLEEP."

The caption reads: "The hardest parenting experience ever was Baby Jesus."

The humor comes from the theological implications of Jesus being both fully human and fully divine (the doctrine of the hypostatic union in Christian theology). If baby Jesus was God incarnate, he would possess divine attributes even as an infant -- including not needing sleep. This transforms a universal parenting frustration (babies who will not sleep through the night) into a theological nightmare: the baby is not just being difficult, it is theologically incapable of sleeping because it is God. The joke plays on the rarely-explored comedic territory of what the day-to-day logistics of raising a divine child would actually look like, finding humor in applying mundane parental complaints to an extraordinary religious figure.

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