Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
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Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is an episodic daily strip by Zach Weiner. The strip has few, if any, recurring characters.
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 Dead Baby Comedy punchline. The cartoonist is self-described as having the abilities of Gary Larson and a sex offender.
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 Perry Bible Fellowship. No relation to Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs.
Tropes used in Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal include:
- Accuse the Witness: Here.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Parodied here.
- Alt Text: Most cartoons have a bonus panel, called the votey, that you see if you mouseover 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 web comics in order to see it.
- Exclusively Evil: Apparently, economists.
- Apocalypse How: One strip starts off with the death of all humans, except for people at frat parties.
- Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Dungeons And Dragons is always the first step.
- Author Avatar: Zach Weiner is redheaded and naked. Always.
- Well, he's not always naked.
- Author Tract: Many strips savage organized religion, in particular Christianity. To be fair, Zach often pokes fun at atheism/agnosticism in the same breath.
- Back to Front: Done many times as a form of comedic reveal.
- Bad Date: "Date Wars" is a bad date summarized in an actiony death-ray battle.
- 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.
- Beat Panel: Four in this comic.
- Belligerent Sexual Tension: This comic cites this trope as the route to the best possible sex.
- Bigger Is Better in Bed: At first, the point of this strip.
- 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 ( ...sorta) in this strip.
- Black Comedy: A lot. A real lot.
- Blessed Are the Cheesemakers: The purpose of life.
- Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Plenty of examples. Here's a literal example.
- Chest Burster: With puppies.
- Clarke's Law for Girls' Toys: Pointed out here.
- Coming Out Story: With a genuinely unexpected twist.
It's okay! The less concentrated your love gets, the stronger-- [SLAM!]
- Compensating for Something: parodied, deconstructed, and played straight here.
- Courtroom Antic
- Crapsack World: Where all doctors and lawyers are incompetent, all relationships are dysfunctional, and suicide and murder are apparently common pastimes. Also, the unicorns? Racists. In some cases though, the doctors are competent sociopaths, and the dysfunctional relationships work due to nightmare fetishism.
- Crap Saccharine World: On occasion.
- Create Your Own Villain: And we mean literally:
- Dating Catwoman: Though not with Catwoman herself.
- Dead Baby Comedy: Often literally, see Running Gag below.
- Deal with the Devil: Several; usually it turns out the mortal was cheated.
- Disproportionate Retribution: A crime deterrent!
- Dogged Nice Guy: Brutally mocked in this comic.
- Doublethink: Parodied in this strip.
- Double Standard: discussed here
- Dramatic Gun Cock: in this panel
- Dream Within a Dream: Taken to ridiculous extremes.
- Easy Road to Hell: There was one strip about a priest being sent to hell... for this reason..
- Eats Babies: Used so often, you'd think it's Author Appeal or something.
- "Everybody Laughs" Ending: here.
- Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: In-universe, the victim of a Take That in this comic.
- Everything's Better with Bob: Inverted in the bonus panel of this installment.
- Everything's Better with Dinosaurs: ...And funnier too! [1]
- Everything's Worse with Bears: The Most Dangerous Game (also a subversion of... yeah).
- Expospeak Gag: In weaponized form.
- Eyes Always Shut: Snobs tend to be drawn this way.
- Fail O'Suckyname: Nobody will ever name anything discovered by Dr Oinky Hitlerballs after himself. He resigns from science.
- Fling a Light Into the Future: Gone catastrophically wrong.
- Foe Yay: Not a riddle.
- 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.
- Freakier Than Fiction: Lies. Just add a monkey dressed as Hitler to anything, and it becomes stranger and fictional.
- Future Imperfect: Invoked. Apparently, Don Quixote's true exploits were quite different from what is written on the novel. [2]
- Gag Boobs
- Gambit Pileup: A psychological experiment ends in this.
- Geeky Turn On: It points out how pathetic you are for doing this.
- Girl-On-Girl Is Hot: As briefly explained by Professor Ferman.
- God Is Evil: Actually, he runs the gamut from all-loving to unspeakably cruel, as fits the gag.
- God Test: A variant in this SMBC comic strip.
- 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.
- 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" stickes 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 this strip.
- Hates Everyone Equally: The tale of Bobby and the Gurg. Averted at the end.
- Half-Human Hybrid: Attempted and failed.
- Heart Is an Awesome Power: With puppies.
- Heroes Want Redheads: The votey contains such information.
- The punchline in this one too.
- Heroic Sacrifice: SAVE YOURSELF, MAMMAL!
- Hidden in Plain Sight: Here.
- Hilariously Abusive Childhood: A great deal of the humour is this.
- Hitler Ate Sugar: You know who else didn't floss? You know, probably.
- 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: Well, not really.
- 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 Banged Your Mom: With a frequent subversion. So much so that it's a running gag.
- I Have No Son: Well, goodnight Susie.
- Impossible Task Instantly Accomplished: What if God took away sex?
- 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.
- Kick the Dog: "I'm beginning to wonder if Fred had an ulterior motive in buying me a puppy for Christmas"
- Lego Genetics: Subverted and mocked.
- Long Runner. So you like the latest strip. You click to the one before. It has a big number in the URL. (2000 as of September 14, 2010.) Then the one before that. Big number minus one. Oh Crap.
- The Magic Poker Equation: parodied in the SMBC Theater episode "Poker World Championships", before the sketch moves on to the realm of pure absurdity.
- Mathematician's Answer: Literally.
- Mix-and-Match Man: Subverted and discussed [3] on this strip.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: By Jesus himself. He tries to patch things up afterwards, though... But not in the way you'd expect.
- Also, Batman
- Nightmare Retardant: In-universe. The most horrible monster of all time!
- Noodle Implements: At the end of this.
- Nostalgia Filter: Addressed here, here, and here.
- Lensman Arms Race: Taken to its logical conclusion.
- Obviously Evil: Inverted here and 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.
- Only Six Faces: Though in this case, it doesn't really matter.
- Painting the Fourth Wall: Right here, subverting your expectations again.
- 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.
- Precious Puppies: Using Heart as an awesome power.
- Prophecy Twist: Played with 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.
- Rule of Cool: A number of punchlines revolve around the idea that, for engineers, Rule of Cool overrides all other considerations.
- Rule 34: Here.
- Running Gag:
- Safe Word: One strip teaches us that introducing safewords in nonsexual contexts is a fun way of creeping people out.
- Screw Yourself: here
- Seen It All: this guy, where sex is concerned.
- Self-Deprecation: fairly common in the mouseover bonus strips.
- Special mention goes to this: "That's Uncle Weiner. He became a cartoonist. So now he's dead to us."
- Self-Made Orphan: The Headless Horsemen here.
- Shout-Out: A little while after Xkcd referenced SMBC's mouseover-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."
- Stealth Cigarette Commercial: Superman subtext with this http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=191
- Sophisticated As Hell: Here's one example.
- Spin the Earth Backwards: Subversively deconstructed. Or... deconstructively subverted? Or something.
- Spoonerism: Here.
- Stating the Simple Solution: A medieval variation in this comic.
- Subverted Rhyme Every Occasion
- 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.
- 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.
- Suicide as Comedy: Quite a few times, like this comic, which also falls under What an Idiot! and Tarot Motifs (if you look closely).
- Take That: often accompanied by a "BAM!" in the Author's Notes.
- That's What She Said: While the consequences were great, it was worth it.
- Too Dumb to Live: Too dumb to die.
- Thanatos Gambit: Several examples of how to use this just to mess around with people, such as here. Or like this. Or this.
- There Can Be Only One: The Ultimate Diet. It even says so in the votey.
- This Isn't Heaven: That's so weird. I've stubbed my toe every 42 seconds since I got here.
- What We Now Know to Be True: A Mother's Love: Nature's Deadliest Poison
- Who's on First?: 57 panels worth of chemistry puns.
- Would Hurt a Child: God, apparently, according to this comic's votey.
- Worth It: on the alt panel of this comic.
- You Cloned Hitler: Now on Deconstructive Parody flavor! Check it here.
- Zig-Zagging Trope: What is this, middle school?
- ↑ Even political cartoons.
- ↑ The Aesop is - Always remember to be polite to your sidekicks!
- ↑ (addressing some of the many reason it wouldn't work on real life)
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