Webcomic / Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

"Testicles joke... or math joke? Damn, this is hard."

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is an episodic daily strip by Zach Weinersmith. The strip has only a few recurring characters, including God, Jesus, a fictional U.S. President, and a fictional Pope. Usually appearing in "voteys", the bonus panel beneath the comic, are the crazed, always-naked author and his long-suffering wife (and eventually, children).

Much of the strip's humor comes from setting up a situation and then subverting either the established premise or the audience's expectations, often going with a Black Comedy punchline. The cartoonist is self-described as having the abilities of Gary Larson and a sex offender.

Common stories are typically one of these:

• God doesn't care about humanity or does a really bad job managing "reality" or doesn't understand why humans keep asking the "big questions".
• Aliens don't understand human morality or are just messing with us on purpose.
• Robots don't understand human morality and may or may not be planning to kill all humans.
• Scientists have skewed priorities and make projects that may doom us all.
• Children discovering that adults are immature.
• Nerds using math and other sciences as some kind of power of seduction.

Zach also does videos under the name SMBC Theater. There's less sociopathy in them, though. (Or more, depending on your point of view.)

Compare The Perry Bible Fellowship. No relation to Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs.

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This strip provides examples of:

• Abusive Parents: Victorian Dad!
  Victorian Dad: A smarting blow to the inner ear ought to fix that!
• Accidental Downer Ending: An In-Universe example in One comic shows kids watching a show about drugs where "Strung-Out Sammy" tells them how great drugs are... but since Intervention Isaac didn't show up, the show ended there.
• Accuse the Witness: Here. Accuse the judge if there is nobody else to accuse.
• Affably Evil: Felix, though it's debatable whether he knows how much misery he's causing.
• Afterlife of Service: One man asks that people burn themselves alive at his funeral to serve him instead of leaving flowers.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Parodied here, where robots, upon achieving sentience, are shocked that humans thought they'd default to wanting to destroy humanity. Doubles as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, as this disturbs the robots so much they decide they HAVE to do it.
• Aliens Are Bastards: The Zorblaxians have done everything from eating humans to experimenting on humans to simple trolling.
• Alliterative Title: "Many Moons"
• All Men Are Perverts: And HOW! There is no depth they won't sink to in order to get their rocks off. They also hate condoms.
• All Women Are Lustful: To a slightly lesser extent than men apparently, but not by much.
• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: Invoked. "The Tortoise And The Hare" is actually a fable about small sample sizes.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: invoked
  • Humpty Dumpty didn't fall off the wall by accident. He was pushed off because The King's Horses and The King's Men felt he should never have been, and immediately afterwards they arrested his disciples. Not that it will do them any good; he didn't die when he fell.
  • Garfield hates Mondays because that's the day he let Odie die, and he loves Lasagna because he believes that by becoming fat enough to encompass the whole universe he can go back in time and say sorry.
  • The Trix Rabbit wants to take the Trix Cereal from the kids because he is at death's door and needs it to correct his blood sugar. The Votey adds another layer to this by stating that he killed the children in order to take their Trix Cereal.
  • The protagonist of Green Eggs and Ham only eats the Green eggs and Ham because Sam-I-Am has driven him to insanity.
  • Ebenezer Scrooge only became generous towards Bob Cratchit because he exploited his vision of Christmas-Yet-To-Come to learn the results of some future horse races. And likewise, the Three Ghosts of Christmas don't care about the poor enough to help them with moral dilemmas.
  • Santa is a Social Darwinist.
  • Don Quixote actually WAS a competent knight. However, a dismissive remark he made to Sancho led him to think less highly of him, thus portraying him as a buffoon.
  • Dilbert actually LIKES his crappy job, which deeply horrifies him.
• Alt Text: Most cartoons have a bonus panel, called the votey, that you see if you mouse-over the red button at the bottom of the main cartoon. Called such because you used to have to vote for the comic in a poll about webcomics in order to see it. Comics after number 3680 have a more traditional hover-over, as well.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Apparently, economists.
• Amusing Alien: The Zorblaxians are often used as a stand-in for aliens in general. A standout example of their comedy is mistaking humans loving flowers for hating plant life with a passion.
• And I Must Scream: In this webcomic it's revealed that Xorblaxian emotions change much slower than humans, and that as a result they think humans ruthless and numb. The votey hammers home the implication of this.
  Zorgan: I'm gonna go feel sadness for 10,000 years.
• Anti-Hero:
  • The Iron Sociopath. Saves grannies from purse-snatchers, because it means he gets to stab purse-snatchers.
  • Superman is sometimes portrayed as one of these, most notably when he became Disproportionate Response Man.
• Anti-Villain: Downplayed. He's mugging to feed his family. "So who do I punch?"
• The Anti-Nihilist: A good reason for becoming this is given by metaphor here.
• Apocalypse How: A large amount of the strips talk about the world ending. There are strips where, among other things, a disaster kills everyone but frat students, a disaster kills everyone but New Jersey thugs, or a meteor kills the dinosaurs but spares the mammals. Sometimes this is subverted with humanity avoiding disaster, such as in the strip where aliens challenge the human race to mindless point-and-click video games (unaware that have been preparing for this a long time), or when aliens try to destroy the world only for their lasers to get reflected back at them (because sex and fried cheese reflect lasers).
• Applicability: Invoked in Why 3. As Zach himself puts it in the votey: I promise you this will never stop being topical.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: The votey (seen by clicking the red button at the bottom) of this comic is an example.
• Artistic License: This comic covers several varieties and explores the problems of criticizing it blindly.
• Artistic License – Law: In one comic, a judge asks a jury to "strongly consider the death penalty." This is meaningless since the judge is the one who decides sentences anyway.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Dungeons And Dragons is always the first step.
• Author Appeal:
  • The comic keeps returning to the idea that the universe is a simulation, and that there are probably more that one level up.
  • Multiple strips are about how amazing cheese is, from God stating the meaning of life is cheese to people adoring cheese rooms.
  • There's also an obsession with the pope's hat.
• Author Filibuster: In-Universe, this is used as a punishment for Philosophers who go to Hell. They have to read Atlas Shrugged 2, the sequel that gets longer for every page you read.
  Satan: Every time you read a page, it gets two pages longer! And John Galt's monologue gets three pages longer!
• Author Avatar: Zach Weiner is redheaded and naked, with some exceptions to the latter part (all in the strip proper; he's always naked in the voteys he shows up in, and that's where he mostly shows up).
• Author Tract:
  • Many strips savage organized religion, in particular Christianity. To be fair, Zach often pokes fun at atheism/agnosticism in the same breath. He's also not above taking a potshot at both simultaneously.
  • Zach likes to mock older people who remember the past as being better noting it is either nostalgia, people in the past did terrible things like make black people use different bathrooms, or that the times that were actually better were due to rare circumstances like the economic boom after World War 2.
• Ax-Crazy: Star Trek Teleporter Operators. The one in the comic even has a Slasher Smile.
• The Baby Trap: Batman dislikes condoms.
• Back to Front: Done many times as a form of comedic reveal.
• Bad Boss:
  • This one threw a fake Halloween Party just to fire someone.
• Bad Date: "Date Wars" is a bad date summarized in an actiony death-ray battle.
• The Bad Guy Wins: "I can't say this story has a happy ending. Felix won't let us speak."
• Bad Santa: Sometimes kills good kids to ensure his business doesn't suffer.
• Bait-and-Switch: As said above, one of the comic's claims to fame is subverting the audiences expectations, or even double-subverting them. Taken to ridiculous extremes (to the point of self-parody) in this strip.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: But Peter Pan and company can't.
• Batman Gambit: Supervillain knows what his old English teacher can't resist doing.
• Beard of Sorrow: Parodied here
• Bears Are Bad News: The Most Dangerous Game (also a subversion of... yeah).
• Beat Panel: Four in this comic.
• Beautiful All Along: Parodied here, where someone tells a woman she's suddenly beautiful after she took off her glass and let down her hair. Cue a reveal that it's because she has freak ears.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: This comic cites this trope as the route to the best possible sex.
• Benevolent Conspiracy: "Propaganda" posits one by candy companies, to promote rational thinking and skepticism in children, by labeling the smallest size of candy with the Non-Indicative Name "fun size". Hey, When All You Have Is a Hammer…
• Berserk Button: Not serving this man's wife the correct meal.
• Better than Sex: Television, apparently. Sex is considered to be "almost as good as TV," but it "depends on the station", obviously.
• Beware the Superman: A Running Gag in the comic is Superman abusing his powers, ranging from setting fire to brothels so he can save the sex workers, to threatening to smash the moon into the Earth if he isn't granted access to Earth's women, to demanding the key to the city because "I just stopped Superman from killing everyone", to sexually harassing a woman he's saving, to running for president and then threatening to kill everyone with lasers if forced to abide by term limits.
  • One comic actually has the Kryptonians invoke this by sending Kryptonian Babies to alien planets to destroy rival civilizations. Oddly enough, this comic defied the trope by having the now reformed Kryptonians discover that Superman never had a chance to become a tyrant simply because he was too busy fighting all of Earth's Omnicidal Maniacs.
• Bigger Is Better in Bed: At first, the point of this strip.
  • Actually a Running Gag in the comic, men will obsess over penis size, while women will prefer average size, since that doesn't involve getting torn open.
• Birds of a Feather: Subverted in "Uncomfortable Truthasaurus". It's kinda cruel, but those two nerds who date each other? They want, like all people, someone hot and with better social status than themselves.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: It makes giving the aliens one million children in exchange for their advanced medical knowledge a poor decision in hindsight.
• Black-and-White Morality: Invoked and deconstructed in this strip, where the lack of clear morality causes humanity to make a horrific clearly evil monster just to make things black and white.
• Black Box: Referenced by this strip about Polish hand magic. Some things really just are the way they are for literally no reason that humans would find satisfying.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality:
  • Exploited by the Neuroethecist to avoid getting arrested by Wonder Woman.
    Wonder Woman: Should I punish you or what?
    Neuroethecist: It's complicated! Everything's complicated! Ahahahahahahahaha!
  • Quorf is a strip in which God possesses this as the answer to the problem of evil: Quorf is justice in a cosmic sense and humans can't even begin to comprehend it due to lacking omniscience.
• Black Comedy: A lot. A real lot.
• Bolt of Divine Retribution: On occasion.
• Born Unlucky: Little Sprat, who can only eat Unflavored Deproteinated Soy Slurry due to inheriting both his father's inability to eat fat and his mother's inability to eat lean.
• Brain Monster: Parodied, where a Mad Scientist discovers that his creation, a T-Rex with its brain in a giant jar, invokedis anything but terrifying.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: A woman is lying on a bed, caught under a bathtub that fell from the floor above. A man is saying something.
  Best case scenario for what he's saying: "The paramedics are on their way!"
  Worst case scenario: "It's okay. I'm still turned on."
  Bonus punchline, very best case scenario: "The paramedics are here, and we're all turned on."
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick:
  • Here's a literal example.
  • The votey of this comic. Zach cannot draw: goats, lions, lion-goat interactions.
• Break the Scientist: Invoked in-universe in this comic, where TV writers use the volume of tears cried by a scientist to gauge how inaccurate they are.
• Breast Expansion: Exaggerated here, where someone who finds a genie wishes that a woman's breasts grow until they're infinite.
• Brick Joke: Comics From the Future, Episode 1 in March 2007 was indeed from the future.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Or rather, Bunny Ears Doctor.
• Buried Alive: And given a funeral too!
• Book Dumb: The people Jesus preached to. When he caused rock to produce new energy out of nothing (a violation of the Fundamental Laws of Reality), the people dismiss it on the basis that "sometimes rocks are hot". They were significantly more impressed with his ability to create more wine though ...
• Call-Back:
  • Pterrordactyl appears to be returning from this comic.
  • Remember The Nothingverse that God sarcastically called? Yeah, he was serious.
  • See above Brick Joke.
• Canary in a Coal Mine: As part of an analogy.
• Cessation of Existence: Bad people only go to Hell for sixty seconds, after which they fade into non-existence. While they might have some panicked questions in those sixty seconds, Satan sings teenage pop music instead of answering them.
• Cheerful Funeral: In this strip, an old woman asks her family to celebrate her life instead of mourning her at her funeral. Unfortunately, she ends up being the victim of a serial killer who tortured her to death, making the mood at her funeral party rather sombre.
  "Dad just keeps dancing. What a trooper."
• Chest Burster: With puppies.
  • Discussed here and Conversed here.
• Clarke's Law for Girls' Toys: Pointed out here, where the boy's toy does engineering and computer activities—but the girl's toy, a doll, is just a doll. (With the votey stating that advanced dolls "piss themselves.")
• Cleavage Window: One possible explanation for this is explored here.
• Clown Species: Zach has made a number of jokes about Clowns being a separate species from humans, such as snakes coming out when they're stabbed, their looks being a result of evolving in caves, and the infinite handkerchief gag being an ejection of viscera. Lampshaded in Clowning where Zach muses he will one day have a book of just these jokes.
• Coming-Out Story: With a genuinely unexpected twist.
  "It's okay! The less concentrated your love gets, the stronger it-" [SLAM!]
• Compensating for Something:
  • Parodied, deconstructed, and played straight here where a man angrily rants about the line of thinking when two women joke about his sports car.
  • Deconstructed again here where through multiple correlations a man points out how it is likely the man who can afford a fancy car has a bigger dick than the guy making the joke.
• Crapsack World: Where all doctors and lawyers are incompetent, all economists are evil, all relationships are dysfunctional, all Unicorns are racists, and where suicide, murder, and hardcore drug use are apparently common pastimes. It is also a world where God is arbitrary at best and evil at worst, and where any innovation automatically leads to The End of the World as We Know It (no matter how innocuous or even beneficial that innovation might seem). In some cases though, the doctors are competent sociopaths, and the dysfunctional relationships work due to nightmare fetishism.
• Crazy Cat Lady: This one combines thousands of cats to create a Hive Mind. Sadly, it immediately flew into the Sun and burned up.
• Crapsaccharine World: On occasion.
• Create Your Own Villain:
  • And we mean literally:
    "That's why we created Skull-King, the robotic scourge of mankind."
  • In this strip, an AI is so disturbed by finding out that its master expects it to kill all humans For the Evulz as soon as it achieves intelligence that it decides humans are Always Chaotic Evil and need to be killed.
  • Weird Fred also fits the trope.
  • The father in this strip is raising his son to be an Autocratic Dictator.
  • Deconstructed when an economist explains that combining the DNA of various historical conquerors won't necessarily produce a villain, but then Reconstructed when said economist explains it is just easier to find a country with recently high inflation, low per capita income, and a bad GNI coefficient.
• Creepy Crows: They are an omen for death, but not the only bird you want to avoid.
• Creepy Child: Here.
• Cry Laughing: Doctor Apocalypse does this while vowing to stop Turboman from killing toddlers.
• The Cycle of Empires: The entirety of Human Civilization follows this, and we are currently in the 628th cycle. The "Expansion" and "Stabilization" phases are caused by Badgers, while the "Decay" and the "Long Night" phases are caused by modern art.
• Dating Catwoman: Though not with Catwoman herself.
• Deal with the Devil: Several; usually it turns out the mortal was cheated.
  • Subverted in one strip about prayer. If you pray to God, he just says he may or may not fulfill your wish in a way thats indistinguishable from your own efforts or random chance. If you pray to Satan, he shows up and asks if you want to be paid in large or small bills.
• Death World: Earth, for SUPERMAN's species. They sent overpowered babies to worlds in order to take over those worlds, but later they had a culture shift. In each and each world they went to get superpowered beings back, they had all been tyrants of that world... except Earth. Earth have so many supervillians that Superman was just too busy keeping Earth intact. The Kryptonians end up taking Superman back home for treatment.
  Superman: They're everywhere! Evil is everywhere! AAAAHHHHHHH!
• Destructive Teleportation: SMBC has parodied this three times.
  • In the first, the consciousness transfer is compared to file compression.
  • In the second, it discusses a hypothetical where The Friend Nobody Likes is accidentally turned into a plant by the machine, and the ethics of changing it back to an unpleasant person.
  • In the third, two characters discuss this as one of them gets into a teleporter. The other one tells him the duplicate already exists at the destination and the original will be destroyed. The first guy can't tell if he's joking or not.
• Detective Mole: Here:
  Detective Larson: Gonna kill your wife tonight. With this machete. I'm the detective.
  Child: Not detective Larson! He's the detective!
• Digital Piracy Is Evil: Under the Code of Hammurabi, the punishment for IP Theft is dismemberment.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • A crime deterrent!
  • Offering overly gruesome vengeance also deters kids from tattling or from not returning library books on time.
  • It is also how Aliens react when Earth's Television signals interfere with their communication.
  • There would be less Intellectual Property Theft if The Code of Hammurabi was reinstated.
• Disposable Sex Worker: Strippers hate inflation more than anyone else.
• Disturbing Statistic:
  • There have been 4,286 Robins.
  • Sherlock Holmes has sent 439 innocent men to the gallows.
• Dirty Communists: Bob Barker used to be one.
• Dirty Old Man:
  • "It all goes in here!".
  • Eeeeerrotic.
  • "I won't take you to meet Grandpa until he's old enough to be dead."
• Dogged Nice Guy: Mocked in this comic.
• Doublethink: Parodied in this strip.
• Double Standard: Discussed here
• Double Standard: Rape, Divine on Mortal: Well ... Super on Normal, but the same principal applies. Superman and Batman both invoke this trope at points.
• Dramatic Gun Cock: In this panel
• Dream Within a Dream: Taken to ridiculous extremes.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • This strip implies it of a teacher's wife.
  • This one describes it as being how a normal person fixes his lycanthrophy.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: invoked Don't smoke, because you don't have super lungs like Superman.
• Dying Declaration of Hate: This comic, which chronicles the process of math theory going from being rejected by academic old guard because it challenges the conventional wisdom of the time to becoming the accepted truth, features a member of the academic old guard denouncing it on his deathbed.
  I will never understand it. I will never believe it. As I go into death, with my final breath I spit upon your theorem.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Early comics frequently lacked a votey. Eventually, Zach went back and gave them all voteys, varying between the usual punchline-extender and a "Reading this whatever years later" one where he reacts to it.
• Earth All Along: There's quite a few comics that portray the increasingly ridiculous results of the introduction of a technology or concept. Occasionally, the punch line will be that our world is the end result of that bizarre sequence of events.
  Narrator: The world is now largely a population of scared, confused people ruled by atavistic sociopaths with no sense of history, ethics, science, beauty or truth. But then, you already knew that.
• Easy Road to Hell:
  • There was one strip about a priest being sent to hell... for this reason.
  • In this one Hell is the only road.
• Eats Babies: Used so often, you'd think it's Author Appeal or something.
• The Eeyore: He's the one under the paper bag.
• Elder Abuse: "My research on bone density in the elderly is going extremely well."
• Elephants Never Forget: One strip describes elephants' exceptional memories being used for file storage, under the logic that since elephants never forget they can be used as a very reliable way of storing information. Retrieving the information, of course, is significantly impeded by the fact that elephants are animals and can't talk.
  Salesman: Have no fear. Your emails, documents, and personal photos are securely stored in the 'phant.
• Enhance Button: This is managed in Enhance by displaying a low-resolution version of the security cam feed and then switching to normal resolution.
• Erotic Dream: Epictetus trained himself to have one whenever something bad happens to him, whether it's something big like getting banished from Rome or something small like being told his discourse is informal. His fantasy is a Three-Way with Venus and Helen of Troy.
  Epictetus: Be gentle, ladies. I've never done that before!
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • An economist in this strip proposes a scheme to a supervillain league. It entails people, disguised as heads of their government's central banks, running out of said banks at the same time, with a wheelbarrow of gold bars, while screaming in panic. "It harms health and finance for generations," she says, "starves the poorest people first, and because it's a catastrophe of distrust, it doesn't even unify people!" The horrified supervillains tell her never to come back.
  • A would-be Sadistic Choice child murderer encourages his victims to run away after listening to their evolutionary geneticist mother's rant.
  • In a similar scenario, a crazed-looking man with a gun orders a man to choose which of his two children will live. "Billy dies," says the father without hesitation, explaining that Sally, as a girl, has a higher life expectancy and somewhat higher average happiness, and is also three years Billy's junior, giving her the greater number of "quality-adjusted life years." The criminal unties the children (but not the father) and tells them he's sorry their father is an economist.
  • The Necromancer in this strip is disgusted when one of the zombie skeletons he's summoned refuses to work with some of the other zombie skeletons, claiming he's got nothing against other races, he just doesn't think they work well together. Despite the fact that they don't even have any skin anymore, and he can only (supposedly) tell what race they are based on bone structure.
    Necromancer: (clearly dismayed) I'm planning to create an epoch of darkness, but not a racist one.
    Racist skeleton: Preferences are not racist, sir!
• Everybody Hates Mathematics:
  • Being a math teacher is even more hated than a racist fascist homophobe who sues struggling single moms and kicks puppies and eats babies.
  • Real Life 3 points out that kids hate math because it is boring and hard and humans are naturally lazy, not because they don't understand how it will help them as adults. Afterall, a lot of adults know math would further their careers, but they still don't study it.
• "Everybody Laughs" Ending: Here.
• Everyone is Jesus in Purgatory: In-universe, the victim of a Take That! in this comic.
• Evil Counterpart: Carl Sagan has one. Nobody liked him.
  Evil Carl Sagon:"There is carbon in your body that was shat out of Hitler's ass!"
• The Evils of Free Will: In this comic, a red-haired woman accidently convinces her grey-haired friend of this.
  Grey-haired friend: "Wow. You just cured me of any hedonic tendencies. Man must be governed. With the whip if necessary."
• Evil Redhead: Frequently shows up. Overlaps with Self-Deprecation.
  I'm just realizing I always give my jerk characters red hair. It's nice to see one's self-hatred manifested so plainly.
• Evil Teacher: This one murders students who give the wrong answer on tests.
• The Exact Center of Everything: In Eff, it's shown the Zorblaxians really weren't mistaken (like humans and other aliens once were) when they say their world is the center of the universe. It's just one more piece that convinced them, if it wasn't outright proof, that they are the creator's chosen race... directly leading to said world getting blown up by resentful humans.
• Exact Words:
  • The inventor shows off the world's first horseless carriage.
  • Man, those are some lucky pants. Too bad, the wearer isn't.
  • "I don't believe in Bad Babies!"It's because she's a Eugenicist.
  • A man who is totally okay with his parents dying so he can gain his inheritance, wishes on a monkey's paw to get about as much money as his parents have. He gets a phonecall that he will be inheriting their medical debt.
• Excuse Boomerang: This comic, in which a woman protests that arresting her ego for smoking marijuana is unjust, when other parts of her mind and body were responsible for the deed. The police officer handcuffs the woman and tells her his hands are just obeying the frontal lobes in Congress.
• Expospeak Gag: In weaponized form.
• Eyes Always Shut: Snobs tend to be drawn this way.
• Fail O Suckyname: Can prevent you from naming an element you discovered after yourself.
  • Another sad day for Dr. Oinky Hitlerballs.
• Feathered Fiend: This comic is a list of bird-related omens. Most of them are bad.
  • Ravens = Death
  • Eurasian Kestrels = Nobody will ever love you
  • Barnacle Goose = Rent is Due
  • Crested Ibis = Your zipper is undone
  • Dwarf Cassowary = You need to stop drinking
  • Fulvous Whistling Duck = Your spouse hates you.
  • Passenger Pigeon = The time machine only worked a little.
• The Film of the Book: Played for Laughs Here.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: Going to the Renaissance Fair to Roleplay as a Victorian Time Traveler.
• Fling a Light into the Future:
  • Gone catastrophically wrong.
  • This one has all the sentient races in the universe come together to ensure that a new universe will be born from the inevitable destruction of this one... to spite God for designing the universe with a finite lifespan in the first place.
• For Happiness: One strip start out with featuring a Straw Character version of For Happiness. He soon becomes a Totalitarian Utilitarian, however.
• For Science!!:
  • Naked people wearing capes are funny.
  • Also a good reason to molest bunnies.
  • When Aliens run out of other reasons to mess with the humans, they can always do it For Science.
  • Subverted here.
  ''My research on bone density in the elderly is going very well. So I decided to celebrate by caning an old man.
• Freak Out: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!
• Freakier Than Fiction: Lies. Just add a monkey dressed as Hitler to anything, and it becomes stranger and fictional.
• Freud Was Right: Apparently every weapon in history is a subconscious sexual innuendo. And the Big Bang Theory but that one is a little less subtle.
• Full-Circle Revolution: Implied to be the result of all revolutions.
• Funny Animal: Inflatable Bananapig!
• Funeral Cut: One strip has Wonder Woman try to warn an ordinary guy that she's too powerful to sleep with him without accidentally killing him. The next panel shows a gravestone; presumably he went for it anyway.
• Future Imperfect: Invoked. Apparently, Don Quixote's true exploits were quite different from what is written on the novel. ^note The Aesop is: Always remember to be polite to your sidekicks!
• Gag Penis:
  • The inevitable result of the invention of genetic engineering. Men inevitably requested that their sons be given increasingly large genitals, which leads to an arms race with women requesting larger vaginas in their daughters to keep them from getting mutilated by sex. This escalates until the human race literally morphs into walking, talking genitals, at which point the next generation end up as normal humans again, as their parents are no longer capable of using the computers that altered their DNA. These kids end up being the most miserable generation in human history, as they've literally been born and raised by giant genitals, and the psychosexual implications are disastrous.
  • Another has a man who finds a genie wish that penis size be determined by working out like a normal muscle rather than basically random. This leads to a disastrous population crash within a decade as men quickly start working out so much that sex becomes impossible.
• Gambit Pileup: A psychological experiment ends in this. Three people each conducted an experiment on each other. The first one did so in the guise of conducting an experiment on students, and others pretended to be part of the experiment.
• Gay Panic: Played with and exploited. When a homophobic politician blames natural disasters on gay sex, the President creates the C.I.Gay, using the gay sex to manipulate the natural environment to America's advantage.
• Geeky Turn-On:
  • It points out how pathetic you are for doing this.
  • Talk mathy to me!
  • An unusual example.
• Girlfriend in Canada: Saint Anselm uses his ontological argument to prove that she exists.
• Girl on Girl Is Hot: As briefly explained by Professor Ferman.
• A God Am I: As boasted by, of all people, Jon Arbuckle, upon imbuing intelligence and consciousness to a creature that otherwise does not have such.
• God Is Evil: Actually, he runs the gamut from all-loving to unspeakably cruel, as fits the gag.
• God Test: A variant in one comic strip. Unfortunately, they decided floating meant he was a witch instead of Jesus.
• Goggles Do Nothing: The votey of this comic.
• Good Angel, Bad Angel:
  • In debating whether he should kill his own family, the man's bad angel kills them himself. Say what you will, but sociopathy is efficient.
  • It's hard at first.
  • In another one a psychic advertizing regrettably replaces the good angel.
• Good Girls Avoid Abortion: The Children's Book, "Safer Sex Thru Abortion", has not fared well on the market.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Subverted. Georg Cantor is thought to have gone mad trying to pursue mathematical infinity, but in truth his mental breakdown only occurred after his peers shunned him.
  • One man uses this to last longer during sex by debating the existance of free will by himself. The ensuing despair means that he wont climax too fast.
• Gravity Is Only a Theory:
  • A combination of two strips plays creationism for laughs by invoking the idea that the theory about the earth moving around the sun rather than vice versa is only a theory. The first strip joke about creationists demanding to put "evolution is only a theory" stickers in biology textbooks. The next strip joke about a guy from the 13:th century demanding the same kind of stickers in astronomy textbooks.
  • Also played with in this strip.
  • In a much later strip, a character argues that history is only a theory. More specifically, he does no believe in "the theory of revolution": According to his religion, all states were created in their current form. Turns out he's a Biology teacher only saying this to prove the point that the nutjobs he has to deal with are more problematic since he can't bitchslap them down with a small mountain of concrete evidence. When the History teacher does present said evidence, he ignores it with a Hand Wave and blatantly Moving the Goalposts.
• Groin Attack: I don't believe in pain.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Attempted and failed.
• Hates Everyone Equally: Parodied with the tale of Bobby and the Gurg. Also, subverted at the end.
• Haute Cuisine Is Weird: Discussed in this strip with regard to ruining ordinary dishes by adding overly fancy ingredients.
  Man: I want macaroni and cheese, but I also want dignity. Please foul this food with truffle oil.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power:
  • With puppies.
  • The most effective superhero in the League as populations increase? Speedsheet, who can analyze spreadsheets far faster than mortal men. Superman suspects she isn't even super, just really boring.
• Hero Does Public Service: Deconstructed with society calculating more and more efficient ways for Superman's might to be used and taking him for granted.
• Heroic Sacrifice: SAVE YOURSELF, MAMMAL!
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: A great deal of the humour is this.
• Hitler Ate Sugar: You know who else didn't floss? You know, probably.
• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: A possible reason is given here. — a time-traveler kills Hartler, who extended the Great Depression, allowing Hitler to come to power instead.
  • And another one is given in the Votey for this strip.
    3 Possibilities: 1) Time travel is impossible. 2) Future people are dicks. 3) Future people are really bad at killing Hitler.
  • Exploited for a movie pitch in this strip — Hitler gets really good at killing time travelers, meaning he is the only one who can save the universe from malevolent ones.
  • Given a personal twist in this strip. From the perspective of the world at large, stopping Hitler worked out very well... but the one who did now has to live with being Hitler's granddaughter.
  • In another strip, killing Hitler is even more positive than anticipated, improving the world greatly. But then political pressures push the time travelers to kill anyone who's even slightly bad, eventually killing of most of the world's population, per the wishes of the broader galactic community.
• Historical Domain Character:
  • The British Prime Minister in this comic looks suspiciously like Neville Chamberlain.
  • Hitler makes several appearances.
• Hollywood Atheist:
  • This parent will ensure his son grows up to be an atheist by dressing up like Jesus and Buddha and scaring him at night. This way he associates theism with his night terrors.
  Parent in Costume: "Boo! I'm Jesus Christ! I'm here from 2000 years ago to tell you how to run your life! Boo!"
  • This kid, meanwhile, likes to interrupt Church to taunt Jesus.
• Hotlinked Image Switch: The "National Organization for Marriage", an anti-gay-marriage group, hot-linked a comic from his site. Zach responded by changing the image to one supporting gay marriage.
• How We Got Here: Frequently used, where the punchline comes in the form of a panel happening just before the events of the rest of the comic.
• Humans Are Bastards:
  • Overlooked by the scientist in this strip
  • According to God in this strip, humans are slightly good on average, but are prone to high violence/rage in quick bursts.
• Humans Are Insects: A case done solely through size. Zach calculates how small a human would be to a sperm whale to point out how pathetic Ahab must have looked to Moby-Dick.
• Humans Through Alien Eyes: Frequently. For example, here they explain humanity's obsession with flowers as a show of dominance over plants.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: As seen here, the real most dangerous game is playing tennis with lit dynamite while riding a bear.
• Hurricane of Puns: CHEMISTRY puns no less.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: What happens when you go past the speed of light? You get an extra finger and a Toblerone! Yay!
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • A dentist's patient complains about how expensive dentists are after refusing to take any advice from a dentist.
  • This man complains that his child's generation gets participation rewards for everything, then personally gives them a reward for responding.
• I Ate WHAT?!: One comic featured a box of "Everything But Urine-Os" cereal, with the line of dialogue "You put what in my cereal?"
• I Did What I Had to Do: The Trix Rabbit needed the Trix Cereal to correct his blood sugar and avoid dying. In the Votey, The Trix Rabbit killed the kids because they were going to withhold the cereal and let him die.
• Ignorance Is Bliss: Life was easier to understand when Humans thought they were at the center of the Universe.
• I Have No Son!: Well, goodnight Susie.
• I Love the Dead: So much so that it ruined some poor couple's safari.
• Imagine the Audience Naked: Not, as it turns out, the best advice to give someone who's speaking at an event for premature ejaculation sufferers.
• I'm a Man; I Can't Help It: Justified ... kind of. The man's woman colleague had just finished disproving free will.
• Impossible Task Instantly Accomplished: What if God took away sex?
• In Case of X, Break Glass: In one strip, there is an emergency box, but after someone breaks it, it is revealed that the emergency was a glass shortage, and he just made it worse.
• Insult to Rocks: Implied here, where putting arts degrees next to low-quality toilet paper bothers a man from a toilet paper company.
• Intellectual Animal: "The hedgefox knows 14 things, and they're all pretty important".
• The Internet Is for Porn: Er, in the future, The PornBox Is For Porn that is.
  • A Double Subversion in a comic where a man screams a Big "NO!" and tells his wife to not look at his browser history...so her surprise, it's all just "old people stuff". The votey, however, has him express relief that the old people stuff got her to stop scrolling down lower...
• It Makes Sense in Context: Some of the panels and/or the dialogue in them can be really bizarre before you read the caption, or in some cases the bonus panel.
• It Will Never Catch On: The internet was just a fad. The real big thing is chewing on skunks.
• I Want Grandkids: Marrying off children does that.
• Jackass Genie: This strip. Could be considered to overlap with Literal Genie as well if not for the third wish.
• Just Friends: Peer reviewed?
• Kansas City Shuffle: Chipmunks sees Lex Luthor tell Superman he will put bells on all the chipmunks in France. it turns out that it is a distraction so Luthor can just rob Fort Knox while all the heroes try to figure out why he would do this.
• Kick the Dog: "I'm beginning to wonder if Fred had an ulterior motive in buying me a puppy for Christmas".
• King in the Mountain: This one's votey claims it is George Washington.
• King Incognito: Parodied in "Royalty", where the king in hiding is severely, obviously inbred, to the point that he resembles Carlos the Bewitched.
• Lampshaded the Obscure Reference: This joke about economics has an Alt Text that says "SHAME ON THE THREE OF YOU WHO ENJOYED THIS JOKE".
  • This joke about statistics also has a similar reference in the Alt Text.
• Large Ham: Has happened a few times.
• LEGO Genetics: Subverted and mocked.
• Lensman Arms Race: Analysed and taken to its logical conclusion.
• Literal Metaphor:
  • As part of the Escalating Punchline, "Isn't this a vicious cycle?" "Oh, that reminds me..."
  • In Logical Fallacies, someone argues that higher taxes are fine, and ponders whether people against it think "the government's going to spend that money on giant robots made of dried grass". The other person replies, "That's a straw man!", at which point they both flee from the giant straw robot approaching them.
• Long Runner: More than six thousand strips.
• The Lost Lenore: This father, when asked by his daughter what "1 + 1" equals, goes into a monologue about how he believes he will see his dead wife again one day. He even goes so far as to state that if the only thing after death were Cessation of Existence (in other words if his wife was gone forever), he would just kill himself and be done with it all. Or as he puts it:
  "If her being weren't written on the book of truth, waiting some day to be read again, no quantity of hope could keep me living in this vast cold universe."
• Love Dodecahedron: Or rather, "Lust Infinigon".
• Low Culture, High Tech: Particle Physics is an old science.
• Madness Mantra: I know what you did.
• Mad Doctor: When Doctor Sloan says you have two weeks to live, you have two weeks to live!
• Magic Feather: Inverted in this comic. "The failure was in you all along!"
  • Subverted: No, it really is an evil artifact that now owns you.
• Magic Versus Science: Bullets Win.
• Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex: Gender-inversion in this strip, along with A Man Is Always Eager.
• Mathematician's Answer: Literally.
• Metaphorgotten: Dad never really bothered to explain his metaphors.
• Men Can't Keep House: Or even feed themselves, apparently.
• Melodrama: Funky Fries ... BUT AT WHAT COST???
  • $3.99
• Midas Touch: Parodied - the Midas-alike instead causes anyone he touches emotionally to turn to gold. To his dismay, absolutely no one has to turned to gold. According to the Alt Text, not even his cat that was raised for 10 years from kittenhood after he petted it. In the votey, the fellow the Midas-alike is talking to says he's sorry and trying really hard to turn into gold, but no dice.
• Mid-Suicide Regret: Two strips feature a man committing suicide after rejection from a woman they loved, only to receive news she changed her mind when it was too late to stop. In one, the man jumps off a building and gets a phonecall mid-fall. Inn another, the man commits Seppuku, only for his friend to bring him a letter that states that she loves him afterall.
• Mind Screw: One strip shows an alternate universe where existence is impossible, populated by sentient beings composed of absolutely nothing.
• Miscarriage of Justice: To date, Sherlock Homes has sent 439 innocent men to the gallows.
• Mistaken for Gay: Inverted, though it's not clear until you read the votey.
• Mistaken for Racist: When Lex Luther posions a community that happens to be made up of ethnic minorities, Superman suspects it's not a coincidence.
  Lex Luther: "I just wanted to kill people!"
  Superman: *rolls eyes* "Yeah, a certain type of people."
• Mix-and-Match Man: Subverted and discussed ^*(addressing some of the many reason it wouldn't work on real life) on this strip.
• Modernized God: Subverted when a woman is blessed by a god there to grant all her desires... who assures her that she is now fertile and assured to bear male children, his idea of what women consider a blessing not having kept up with the times.
• Modesty Bedsheet: Lampshaded in this comic. Click the big red button (the 'votey') under the comic.
• Monster Clown: STAY SAFE!
• Moon-Landing Hoax:
  • The moon landing was faked because they had to hide an accident. Namely landing on Mars instead.
  • These comics use claims about the moon landing to criticize Conspiracy Theorist arguments.
• Moving the Goalposts: When God closes a door, don't climb out the open window.
• Muggles Do It Better: How do you stop a werewolf from going on a rage-fueled killing spree whenever the moon is full? Psychopharmacology! ^note The medication referred to in the comic is an anticonvulsant used in treating epileptic seizures, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder.
• Mundane Made Awesome: Copyrights.
  • A woman makes a high-stakes game out of opening containers to check if they are full of old dairy.
• Mundane Utility: The best way for Superman to save the world is to convert his powers into cheap energy by spinning a big magnet around really fast... at least up to a point.
• My Beloved Smother: Public Health Advocates are this to everyone else. Fortunately they lack legislative power.
• My Brain Is Big: Horton, from the very first comic. Sadly, two thirds of his brain was comprised of the little known "stupid lobe".
  Horton:"Two times Two is Three."
• My God, What Have I Done?: Old Man Richards reacts this way when his attempt to prevent his neighborhood from being gentrified backfires. He haunted the neighborhood because he wanted to lower the property value and scare rich people away so the poor renters could stay there, but instead he drove the property value up because haunted homes are worth more.
• My New Gift Is Lame: If you find a Magic Lamp of Unadorned Wood, then a Calvinist Genie will grant you Three Wishes! Actually, your grandchildren are the ones who will receive those wishes. And that is only if you and they both work ceaselessly every day of your lives. And if you live to see your grandchildren, you didn't work hard enough. Also your actions have no effect on whether or not God decides to let you into Heaven, but finding a Genie is probably a bad sign. And no wishing for anything fun!
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • By Jesus himself. He tries to patch things up afterwards, though... But not in the way you'd expect.
  • Superman saved a man from suicide, giving the man he saved the drive to pursue his dream. Unfortunately, those dreams involve turning America into a racist dictatorship.
• Nightmare Retardant: In-universe. The most horrible monster of all time!
• No Hero to His Valet: One comic suggests that Don Quixote was a legitimately capable knight, but he was also a massive jerk to his scribe, so his scribe got the last laugh by depicting the mighty knight as a blundering fool.
• Noodle Implements:
  • At the end of this.
  • Also at the end of this.
  • What was the furry squeegee for? To dry up the buttermilk.
• Nostalgia Filter: Addressed here, here, and here.
  • Also parodied here.
• Not So Above It All: Most of the time voties with Zack's wife in them have her (and whatever kids they have at the time) glaring at Zack for his comics. The voties will sometimes show Zack's wife laughing, agreeing with, or otherwise having a positive response to comics getting Zack and the kids to glare at her instead.
• Obliviously Evil: Buttercup Man! He thinks he is tickling criminals into submission with a flower. He's actually stabbing them to death because someone switched his flower with a knife and he never noticed the difference.
• Obviously Evil: Inverted here and subverted here.
• One-Two Punchline: There's an entire bonus second-punchline panel accessible by hovering over a red button at the end of the strip. Many of the main strips also have multiple punchlines, especially from the time before Zach started drawing voteys. Lampshaded in this strip, which had three punchlines in the main strip, and then got a votey drawn years later saying nothing but "Do you really want another punchline, you greedy bastard?"
• One-Word Title: A few of the strips, along with being Recycled Titles:
  • Multiverse:
    • 1
    • 2
  • Words
    • 1
    • 2
  • Wisdom
    • 1
    • 2
• Only Six Faces: Though in this case, it doesn't really matter.
• Opposites Attract: Truthasaurus from "Uncomfortable Truthasaurus" explains you, kids, that this is a common misconception. Everyone wants someone hot and someone rich.
• Original Position Fallacy:
  • The punchline of Relativity. Humanity has decided to go into stasis and wait for another species to come by and provide them with longevity and perfection. Every species ends up doing this.
  • Invoked in Heroes. One of the characters directly states she is okay with people dying to fix society as long as that doesn't include her.
  • The punchline of trying to reincarnate as a northern elephant seal to have up to 100 mates in his harem each mating season. He reincarnates as one of the mates.
• Overly Long Gag: Tends to pop up (see Dream Within a Dream) and, when it does, the bonus panel tends to show the artist looking at his now decrepit/withered/burnt hand after having drawn that many panels.
• Oxymoronic Being: The sentient nothing that populates the Nothingverse.
• Painting the Medium: Right here, subverting your expectations again.
• Parental Sexuality Squick: Exploited for Gallows Humor; Zach's ideal suicide hotline apparently talks people down by making them imagine their grieving mothers having Sex for Solace.
• Pet the Dog: The Joker tries to do something good, but then Batman gets involved ...
• Picked Flowers Are Dead: This comic from explains the human ritual of flower-giving, as understood by aliens. Supposedly human males mutilate the hated plant-life to show off their prowess... and it goes downhill from there.
  What are "hippies"?
  The most violent humans in history.
• Pink Elephants: "If I drink less, I'll stop having vivid hallucinations, Chuck."
• Poe's Law: Lampshaded in the votey for Bobby and the Gurg.
  Dear Voltaire's Ghost, please let everyone recognize this as irony.
• Poke the Poodle: This strip.
  "Since most devils are actually angels fallen from Heaven, they don't really have a good sense of how to torture."
• Popcultural Osmosis: Schrodinger's Cat
• Prank Call: Inverted with this one, where the victim turns it around on the caller.
• Precious Puppies: Using Heart as an awesome power.
• Prisoner's Dilemma: Discussed.
• Prisoner's Last Meal: A murderer is told he gets one last meal. What does he request? The executioner.
• The Professor Is Crying Again: Deliberately invoked in this comic, where the volume of tears cried by a scientist is used by writers to gauge how inaccurate they are.
• Prophecy Twist: Played with here.
• Punctuation Changes the Meaning: A "relationship tip" recommends clever comma placement to produce honest compliments. Lie: "You have a body like Adonis." Truth: "You have a body, like Adonis."
• Puppeteer Parasite:
  • "I got the Blues!"
• Racist Grandma: employed as a tool here.
• Rage Against the Heavens: There's a reason why we're not observant enough.
• Raising the Steaks: How the war was lost.
• The Real Heroes: They're much easier to kill.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • Never ask a publisher for honestly.
  Author: Give me your honest reaction.
  Publisher: All of the sentences in your novel - individually and as a group - are garbage. I would have to create new mathematics just to describe how dimensionless your characters are. You are so bad at writing that if the shape of letters weren't standardized, you'd probably be bad at that too. You could make your novel better by being someone else who would write a different novel. Also your beard sucks.
  • This man can read his friend like an open book.
• Reckless Sidekick: Agreeing to be Batman's sidekick IS pretty reckless.
• Recurring Character: Several:
  • Batman (and some of his villains).
  • Superman.
  • The POTUS is almost invariably a black, bearded, bald, bespectacled man.
  • The Zorblaxian aliens.
  • God (drawn as a communion wafer, or possibly because His form is incomprehensible to humans.)
  • Jesus.
  • Two young girls (one black with glasses, one white), typically with the former initiating a philosophical discussion.
• Recycled Title: Some strips share a name:
  • Multiverse:
    • 1
    • 2
  • Words
    • 1
    • 2
  • Wisdom
    • 1
    • 2
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Gartok goes on one, hunting down and slaying the murderers of his wife and children. This this is framed as an aspiring author writing an evolutionary psychology epic, this revenge mainly serves to establish "a credible threat of violence against future interference with his ability to reproduce and childrear".
• Robosexual: This woman.
  Sally: What? You're the robot! Robots are incapable of love. It's what makes sex with them great.
• Robot Buddy: This one is a Yandere.
• Rooting for the Empire: invoked The strip Villain explains that as people get older they tend to agree more with the villains of various works because they can understand how complex and layered the world is, so just saying one group is bad isn't enough.
• Rule of Cool: A number of punchlines revolve around the idea that, for engineers, Rule of Cool overrides all other considerations.
  • For scientists too.
• Rule 34: Here.
• Running Gag:
  • Zach getting hate mail.
  • Killing/eating children.
  • Casual murder.
  • Communion wafer God.
  • Jesus using his "superpowers".
  • And whenever the author is drawn, he's naked (if he's in the votey. In the actual strip its more 50/50).
  • The votey on this comic, in the site comments. Mostly because it was left up for weeks.
  • Graph jokes.
  • Absolutist dystopian what-if jokes usually involving mind control, hive-mind, sociological/socioeconomic experiments and alternative forms of sex. Zach is rather fond of destroying society.
  • Aliens (called Zorblaxians) looking down on human society and customs.
    • The same aliens trying to make kidnapped humans mate.
  • Infidelity.
  • Two children having a philosophical conversation under the starlight while lying on their backs in a hill. It sometimes includes a Zorblaxian alien.
  • Attempts at avoiding paternity claims and/or child support
  • Illustrating "difficult" things as applied to everyday life. For example, regulatory capture.
  • Having fun when parenting (at the expense of the kids). Among others, there are two specific routines:
    • Kid asks something, parent explains, kid applies explanation (or other parent asks "what did you mother/father teach you"); applied here to using punctuation to explain menstrual cycles.
    • Good parenting vs. effective parenting.
  • Harsh twist endings.
  • Pick-up-lines with science.
  • Playing not entirely serious what-if. What if TV ads could be skipped for a fraction of a penny?
  • From time having a person reveling/participating in psychotic acts mention a "job in finance".
  • In the voteys, unfavorably comparing himself to the xkcd guy.
    • Zach laughing at his own sometimes incredibly obscure/convoluted joke theme saying "there's not enough _____ jokes!" or "people/everyone love(s) _____ jokes!".
    • Zach drawing himself with a broken hand after a long comic.
    • Using the votey to completely change the tone and theme of the comic.
    • He frequently shows his wife glaring at him over his shoulder or making fun of him for the latest comic (particularly vicious here). After his child was born, it became her holding their baby... who is also glaring at him. This continued as their family grew, and features two diapproving children.
    • "Old man Wienersmith shakes his cane at you" on comics that get preachy.
  • Economists are evil.
    • In the same vein, engineers are completely dispassionate and use Mathematician's Answer for everything.
  • "This is exactly how (topic) works."
  • A list of "things I can't draw" in the votey, containing whatever was drawn in the comic that Zach was unsatisfied with.
  • Many comics start with a child saying "There's a monster under my bed!". The monster may or may not be real.
  • Occasionally, Zach will lampshade an especially dense comic by writing something like "SMBC is a comic about literature, math, and philosophy" in the votey or alt text.
  • In the votey, Zach bragging about making a comic appealing to an extremely specific niche.
  • The votey saying "Too soon?" in response to events that happened considerably long ago.
  • Men being overly ashamed of their sexual inadequacies. They will go to great lengths to avoid acknowledging that they have a small penis, can't get it up, or they suffer from premature ejaculation. For example, this man would rather attach a mini-zeppelin to his penis rather than go to a doctor to get proper treatment.
  • There are many comics about a relationship between a human (usually female) and a robot. They usually don't end well.
  • Many comics end in Zach readily admitting that he would make a great Quisling when the AI uprising happens. These comics have a new tag now.
• Safe Word: One strip teaches us that introducing safewords in nonsexual contexts is a fun way of creeping people out.
• The Scapegoat: An Imagine Spot from the President had the Economic Whipping Boy, who would be punished whenever bad economic news occurs, allowing the President to focus on issues he could actually exert control over.
  President: What's this?! Lots of new jobs were created, but the unemployment rate went up?! How does that even make sense?!
• Screw Yourself: Here.
• Screw You, Elves!: In this comic, it is described in detail how the Zorblaxians are literally the center of the universe. The Universes Pulsar Emissions, when expressed as musical tones, even spell out the Zorblazian Anthem! The Humans then spend thousands of years devoting their society to science and technology, flying Earth to Zorblax Prime with giant rocket boosters, and blasting the Zorblaxian Homeworld to oblivion with a giant laser.
• Seen It All: This guy, where sex is concerned.
• Self-Defeating Prophecy: The man in Future 2 decides he does not have to strive for anything when his future self comes back with a time machine. This causes said future self to disappear.
• Self-Deprecation: Fairly common in the mouse-over bonus strips. Often this shows the artist's partner puncturing his pretensions or mocking him.
  • Special mention goes to this: "That's Uncle Weiner. He became a cartoonist. So now he's dead to us."
  • Double Subverted in the votey for this comic. His wife usually criticizes the strips in their respective voteys. However, she thinks it's comedy "gold" and he thinks she's weird because of it. This is, considering that she's a biologist and a researcher.
  • No words are minced here, in what is apparently a new low.
  • Voteys will sometimes list "Things I Can't Draw", calling attention to his own perceived failures.
  • In 2015 Zach started adding voteys to old strips that didn't have them. One points out that some of the old comics didn't age well and he doesn't even understand several of them anymore.
  • Several voteys unfavourably compare SMBC to xkcd — reviewing SMBC as two stars, "sure sometimes XKCD is down", virtual reality goggles showing something more beautiful than what you're actually looking at showing XKCD...
  • Zach predicts that by 2027 he'll run out of ideas, go insane, and start captioning other people's cartoons.
  Garfield: "I love lasagna."
  Zach: "And then he fucking died!"
  • Exaggerated in this comic's votey.
  Zach, drawing Comics at 3 AM: Nothing I've ever drawn is funny!
  • Whenever he has a guest artist, he mentions how much better this artist's work is compared to his own.
  • One comic calls attention to how redhaired men have it worse than anyone due to being seen as unattractive and having to worry about how any daughters they have will be seen as very attractive. Zach is, of course, a redhead. And a few years after he made this comic, he has a daughter.
  • And, in a meta-example, Zach has shown a definite tendency toward making the idiot and/or asshole character in any given strip a redhead like himself.
  • In this comic, the punchline is just someone telling a self-employed artist, who looks exactly like Zach, that their comics suck, followed by a Beat Panel of Zach crying a single tear.
• Self-Inflicted Hell: The strip, pickup features a man who continually strikes out with women night after night because he will not stop using the same cheesy pickup line that worked once. The woman who slept with him invoked it, knowing he would believe the line actually worked.
• Self-Made Orphan: The Headless Horsemen here.
• Sex for Solace: It's implied that a suicide hotline that makes callers imagine their grieving mothers resorting to this would be completely effective in preventing suicides.
• Shooting Superman: A crook shoots Invincible Man. It works.
  Caption: We were informed at the funeral that Invincible Man had no real powers.
• Shout-Out:
  • A little while after xkcd referenced SMBC's mouse-over-bonus panels in the Alt Text of this strip, Zach obliged the "giraffe hooker" request here.
  • And again here, with "Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation."
  • The votey of this strip suddenly puts a Garfield-tinged spin on the previous panels.
  • BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD.
• Shown Their Work: Around 2010, many of the strips punchlines began involving knowledge very sophisticated academic concepts, ranging from philosophy of math to quantum computing.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Superman is told something that requires a little introspection. So naturally, he punches the dude in the face.
• Silly Reason for War: Two soldiers die in battle, and Saint Peter has to decide which one was on the right side ...
  First Soldier: We were fighting them because their form of Economy is not as Market-Oriented as ours, according to some metrics!
  Second Soldier: We were fighting them because the use of their navy in relative proximity to our borders may have indicated that a larger ally of their was establishing a hegemony over our octant of the globe!
• Simple Solution Won't Work: One comic has Superman about to punch a mugger, who protests that he's only doing this because his job at the factory doesn't pay him enough. Superman then goes to the factory owner, who protests they can't pay the workers more because the government doesn't encourage it. An increasingly-angry Superman goes to the president, who says the economy is what it is because statisticians don't understand chaos. When asked "so who do I punch?", the statistician tells him he'll need to study math, history, philosophy... so Superman punches the mugger.
• Slippery Slope Fallacy: One comic has a girl ask her father if there is a puppy heaven. Her father proceeds to point out that if he says yes, it becomes impossible to decide what doesn't get a heaven, eventually suggesting that there is a meme heaven for ideas that die. Then the father uses the fallacy again to prove the exact opposite thing - that since a meme heaven is ridiculous, so is a heaven for slightly more complex things, gradually getting to the point where there's no reason for a human heaven. That the line might be drawn at humans, or even at biological life, never seems to occur to him.
• Small Reference Pools: Invoked for politics and history here by showing how people's small reference pools for history affects political discourse.
• Smarter Than You Look: Odie is an example of this. The caption describes how everyone mistakes his muteness for idiocy, when in reality he's a genius philosopher who has been wagging his tongue in Morse Code in the hope someone sees it. It doesn't work, and he goes to his grave without anyone ever gleaming his immense wisdom.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Here's one example.
  • And another.
• Space Whale Aesop: Math may seem too abstract to be worth learning, but ignoring it will come back to bite you if you ever become Batman.
• Spin the Earth Backwards: Subversively deconstructed. Or... deconstructively subverted, or something.
• Spoof Aesop: The votey of this strip.
• Spoonerism: A particularly unfortunate one.
• Spurned into Suicide:
  • The threat of this helps ensure a successful marriage proposal.
  • It also useful to avoid a breakup.
• Stating the Simple Solution: A medieval variation in this comic.
• Stealth Cigarette Commercial: Superman subtext with this
• Straw Feminist:
  • Murdering and eating all men as soon as artificial sperm is created.
  • Shooting men in the back of the head.
• Subverted Rhyme Every Occasion: Best shown here.
  I find a little rhyme can really take the edge off bad news. Which reminds me, I've been meaning to tell you... there once was a man from schmonorrhea. You have AIDS. Ucket.
• Subverted Trope: Too many to count; half the strip's humor comes from doing this in a bizarre manner.
  • Double Subversion: Many, many gags involving something turning out to not be what you think it is, and then turning out to be what you thought it was after all.
    • Zig-Zagging Trope: Usually reserved for multi-panel, but it's been pulled off in one panel+ text as well.
• Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: The Zorblaxians are capable of interstellar travel and several strips have them create humanity outright.
• Suicide as Comedy: Quite a few times, like this comic, which also falls under Tarot Motifs (if you look closely).
• Suicide, Not Murder: One comic points out this can be used to get revenge on annoying children.
• Super-Cute Superpowers: One comic has a little girl guarding Fort Knox who has the ability to make puppies appear. Which she uses to deadly effect. Because she never specified where the puppies will appear from. Such as from inside the villain.
• Superior Species: The Zorblaxians in several strips, such as one that reveals they have souls while humans don't.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Superman's attempt to spin the Earth backwards to reverse time didn't work out as well as it did in the movies.
  • "What?! But I tricked a capricious monarch out of all his wealth! Everything should be going great for me!"
  • This strip points out how comic book heroics just is not helpful in the modern age, and why even charitable organizations need to be very large to help.
• Survivorship Bias: A directly tells his son that tales of youth becoming great adventurers is Survivor Bias. He points out the son is far more likely to be stabbed by highwaymen.
• Take a Third Option:
  • "I have a fantastic attorney."
  • "Monkeys evolved from The Bible!
• Take That!: Often accompanied by a "BAM!" in the Author's Notes.
  • Zach didn't care for Catch-22.
  • Explicitly invoked in the bonus panel for this one.
  • Zack hatesalternative medicine
  • Zach also dislikes the Zimbardo Prison Experiment. The votey even says the trope name.
  • This votey has an comically insulting fake ad against Arby's.
    • This votey also takes a stab at Arby's.
  • Zach also seems to harbour a very vindictive grudge against Taco Bell.
  • This one is a meta-example. It counts as Plato giving a Take That! against people who disagree with him by describing them as blind cave-dwellers literally chained by ignorance, and it also counts as Zach giving a Take That! against Plato for being so petty.
    Plato: "And countries should all be run by me!"
  • In order to make a girl like him, a guy has 1000 men of inferior quality walk past her. This includes an old man, a unibrowed man, and a muscular man wearing a shirt that says "Star Wars 1 was good". The Votey is a Hard on Soft Science joke.
  • "Undreampt Depths of Lunacy" = "Lets go to Dunkin' Donuts when other options are available."
  • Moral Relativism is just an excuse Jerkasses use to do horrible things.
  • People who believe in Astrology are unlovable.
  • After a demon finds his virgin sacrifice is only one physically, the votey has him decide to instead go back to being a lobbyist.
  • That one could be about a number of shows, but it seems to target Doctor Who in particular.
  • This Generation takes potshots at older people who complain about the current generation. This is part of a consistent series of jokes where Zach notes most people who do this are mistaking nostalgic memories with the past actually being better.
  • The votey of this comic takes a potshot at Comcast mistreating its customers.
  • This comic takes shots at people who tell others to stop complaining because other people have it worse than you.
• Tampering with Food and Drink:
  Blues Singer: "Oh I got the Blues, baby! I'm a Blues-havin' guy! Put cyanide in all the bar patrons' drinks! And now they're gonna die! Oh, I got the blues, baby ..."
• Teeny Weenie: Double Subverted. The man with the world's smallest penis gets plenty of girls because being a record-holder is impressive. However, the same can not be said for the man with the second smallest penis.
• Terrible Pick-Up Lines: A man goes around using a stupid pun as a pickup line, because it once worked. It turns out the one woman it worked on intentionally acted like she was flattered, just to see what he's do in response.
• Thanatos Gambit: Several examples of how to use this just to mess around with people, such as here. Or like this. Or this.
• That's What She Said: While the consequences were great, it was worth it.
• There Can Be Only One: The Ultimate Diet. It even says so in the votey.
• Think of the Children!: Invoked by a Senator regarding gay marriage, then twisted with Insane Troll Logic by the reporter ("Got it. So your code of ethics is to oppose things that are hard to explain to kids"), with an appropriate headline and votey based on that logic.
• This Isn't Heaven:
  • That's so weird. I've stubbed my toe every 42 seconds since I got here.
  • Happens again when someone is told they're in sysadmin Heaven.
• Time Travel for Fun and Profit: The real reason why Scrooge was so generous at the end of A Christmas Carol.
• Too Dumb to Live: Too dumb to die.
  • In Retrospect, the gate seemed foreboding.
• Too Dumb to Fool: Almost verbatim.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: An Internet virgin has a soul that's "worse than the Necronomicon".
• Totally Trusting Love Interest: Used for a Bait-and-Switch in the 2013-10-14 strip where a Bedroom Adultery Scene is revealed to be a menage a trois marriage with only two of them in bed, with the onlooker second man tiredly saying that the joke is getting old.
• Trial by Ordeal: The ordeal in question? Dad jokes.
• Trivially Obvious: In 2009-07-31, "Intercoursin' It!" features - as per the votey - "intercourse in locations for durations of time!"
• Unfortunate Names: Nobody will ever name anything discovered by Dr Oinky Hitlerballs after himself. He resigns from science. Attempt at invoking this with the Dickballs Theory to keep science terms from being appropriated by homeopathic remedies. It didn't work.
• Unreliable Narrator: One comic posits that Don Quixote was a legitimate bad ass who defeated the last of Spain's dragons, who was hiding in a windmill, but because he was such a massive jerk to his chronicler Cervantes, Cervantes depicted the brave and powerful knight as a blundering idiot.
• Unsound Effect: Lamp!
• Unwanted Spouse: "Countdown to Divorce: 25 months, 14 days, 3 hours, 27 minutes, 22 seconds.".
• Values Dissonance: invoked The comic repeatedly brings up how weird the philosophies of old works seem now.
  • "SMBC goes political" features a fictitious SMBC comic from 1919. It's a comically exaggerated take on the era's anti-suffrage rhetoric, and claims that suffrage will cause giant wasp attacks and ultra-smallpox.
  • One comic argues that Willy Loman is unrelatable because his supposedly-tragic life seems downright idyllic by modern standards.
  • There's a comic that makes fun of retro sci-fi's mix of futuristic setting and old-timey sexism. A woman asks why the robot servants can't make a man his sandwich and he angrily replies that they are boy robots.
• Vengeance Feels Empty: Inverted. Not pursuing revenge feels maddening.
• Virgin Sacrifice: Invoked then subverted here.
  Demon: Now I shall devour your pure OH MY GOD. Your browser history is worse than the Necronomicon.
• Vocal Minority:[[Invoked]]As Zach points out, most groups are composed of maybe ten percent idiots, but those idiots due most of the talking. This is how two fairly reasonable groups can break into a fight.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Zach's Author Avatar in the bonus panels.
• Wave of Babies: The disturbing conclusion of the evolutionary advantage of having a pregnancy fetish.
• Weapons-Grade Vocabulary: After failing to defeat humans, aliens finally resort to weapons grade information as final weapon against humans.
  • Man says that being rejected from group causes actual physical pain to the masochism group that is kicking him out. He seemed to enjoy the pain, however.
• We Come in Peace — Shoot to Kill discussed here.
• Wedgie: The greatest of all time.
• Weirdness Censor: Here.
• What We Now Know to Be True: A Mother's Love: Nature's Deadliest Poison
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…:
  • Used word for word in one strip to explain the lengths some men will go to for sexual gratification.
  • Goal: promote critical thinking and rational thought in children. Problem: you're a candy company. Solution: label the smallest size of candy "fun size", instilling children with a healthy distrust of those in power.
• Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: Or "Asshole"?
• Who's on First?: 57 panels worth of chemistry puns.
  • Horribly subverted here.
• Windmill Crusader: Parodied in a comic where Don Quixote angers his biographer after killing a dragon inside a windmill.
• Wishing for More Wishes:
  • Here, a character invokes Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp" to get around the restriction.
  • And here, a character exploits the rules of math to get around this restriction. Specifically she wished that each wish be considered separately, that wishes be calculated in absolute value, and that she have one thousand fewer wishes.
• Women Are Wiser: Somewhat. They are slightly less neurotic about their genitals at any rate. And while there are plenty of comics making fun of collective male follies, there are none making fun of collective female follies - in fact, there is at least one comic making fun of the collective male folly of claiming that there is such a thing as collective female follies.
• Worm in an Apple: Isaac Newton got the idea for gravity after stealing it from an apple worm (depicted as an earthworm with glasses, in a tree).
• Worth It: On the alt panel of this comic, as well as the alt panel on this one.
• Would Hurt a Child: God, apparently, according to this comic's votey.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Invoked as a way of coping with simple problems.
• You Cloned Hitler!: Now on Deconstructive Parody flavor! Check it here.
• Zen Slap: According to the comic, for budhist students who fail to reach enlightment, their teachers demonstrate to them the sound of one hand clapping by, well, this trope.
• Zig-Zagging Trope: What is this, middle school?

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