Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

what-the

2024-05-13 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
what-the
Votey panel for what-the
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic reimagines the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah from God's perspective, but with a very different complaint than the traditional one. In the Bible, God destroys Sodom for the wickedness of its inhabitants. Here, God's angels report that "all the humans are down there doing butt stuff all the time," and God responds with exasperation -- not moral outrage, but the weary frustration of someone who designed a system and the users are using it wrong.

The first angel asks, "Why don't you destroy them like you did to Sodom?" God's response -- "Post a friendly warning" -- is a hilariously corporate, modern escalation strategy, as if God is an IT administrator issuing a terms-of-service notice rather than an omnipotent deity. The warning itself is delivered on a glowing tablet or stone: "I can no longer watch your sins without retinas. Cease or I will Sodomize you."

The punchline works on multiple levels. "Sodomize" here means "do to you what I did to Sodom" (destroy you with fire), but of course in modern English, "sodomize" refers to exactly the activity God is complaining about. So God's threat inadvertently sounds like He's proposing to join in rather than punish them. The comic finds humor in the gap between Biblical language and modern connotation -- God can't even threaten punishment for a sex act without the name of that punishment sounding like the sex act itself.

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