Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Time Travel Hitler

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.Southward. President, and a fictional Pope. Unremarkably appearing in "voteys", the bonus panel beneath the comic, are the crazed, always-naked author and his long-suffering wife (and somewhen, children).

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

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

Compare The Perry Bible Fellowship. No relation to Chocolate-Frosted Saccharide 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 ready that!"

• Charge the Witness: Hither. Accuse the judge if in that location is nobody else to accuse.
• Affably Evil: Felix, though it'southward debatable whether he knows how much misery he's causing.
• A God Am I: Equally boasted by, of all people, Jon Arbuckle , upon imbuing intelligence and consciousness to a animal that otherwise does not have such.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Parodied here, where robots, upon achieving sentience, are shocked that humans idea they'd default to wanting to destroy humanity. Doubles as a Cocky-Fulfilling Prophecy, as this disturbs the robots and then much they make up one's mind they HAVE to practice 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 club to get their rocks off. They too detest condoms.
• All Women Are Lustful: To a slightly lesser extent than men apparently, but non by much.
• Alternate Aesop Estimation: Invoked. "The Tortoise And The Hare" is really a fable nearly small sample sizes.
• Culling Character Interpretation: invoked
• Alt Text: Almost cartoons have a bonus panel, chosen the votey, that yous run into if you mouse-over the ruddy push at the lesser of the primary cartoon. Called such because you used to have to vote for the comic in a poll about webcomics in order to run across it. Comics afterwards number 3680 have a more traditional hover-over, besides.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Apparently, economists.
• Agreeable Alien: The Zorblaxians are often used as a stand-in for aliens in general. A standout example of their one-act is mistaking humans loving flowers for hating plant life with a passion.
• And I Must Scream: In this webcomic information technology's revealed that Xorblaxian emotions alter much slower than humans, and that as a result they call back humans ruthless and numb. The votey hammers abode the implication of this.

  Zorgan: "I'm gonna go experience sadness for 10,000 years."

• Anti-Hero:
• Anti-Villain: Downplayed. He'due south mugging to feed his family. "And then who exercise 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 globe ending. At that place are strips where, among other things, a disaster kills everyone but frat students, a disaster kills everyone merely New Jersey thugs, or a meteor kills the dinosaurs but spares the mammals. Sometimes this is subverted with humanity avoiding disaster, such equally in the strip where aliens claiming the homo race to mindless bespeak-and-click video games (unaware that accept been preparing for this a long time), or when aliens endeavor to destroy the world only for their lasers to go reflected back at them (because sex and fried cheese reflect lasers).
• Applicability: Invoked in Why three. As Zach himself puts information technology in the votey: I promise you this will never cease existence 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.
• Arise to a College Aeroplane of Being: Dungeons And Dragons is ever the first step.
• Author Appeal:
  • The comic keeps returning to the idea that the universe is a simulation, and that at that place 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 doting cheese rooms.
  • There'south also an obsession with the pope's hat.
• Author Delay: 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 folio you read.

  Satan: "Every time you read a page, it gets two pages longer! And John Galt's monologue gets three pages longer!"

• Writer Avatar: Zach Weiner is redheaded and naked, with some exceptions to the latter function (all in the strip proper; he'due south always naked in the voteys he shows upwardly in, and that's where he more often than not shows upward).
• Writer Tract:
  • Many strips fell organized organized religion, in item 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 retrieve the past equally existence better noting information technology is either nostalgia, people in the past did terrible things similar brand black people use dissimilar bathrooms, or that the times that were actually better were due to rare circumstances like the economic boom after World War two.
• Ax-Crazy: Star Trek Teleporter Operators. The ane in the comic even has a Slasher Smile.
• The Baby Trap: Batman dislikes condoms.
• Back to Front: Washed many times equally a form of comedic reveal.
• Bad Boss:
  • This ane threw a fake Halloween Party just to fire someone.
• Bad Date: "Date Wars" is a bad date summarized in an actiony decease-ray battle.
• The Bad Guy Wins: "I can't say this story has a happy catastrophe. Felix won't allow us speak."
• Bad Santa: Sometimes kills good kids to ensure his business doesn't suffer.
• Bait-and-Switch: As said above, i 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 Exhale in Infinite: Merely Peter Pan and company can't.
• Batman Gambit: Supervillain knows what his old English teacher can't resist doing.
• Beard of Sorrow: Parodied hither
• Bears Are Bad News: The Most Dangerous Game (as well a subversion of... yes).
• Beat Panel: Four in this comic.
• Beautiful All Forth: 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 information technology's because she has freak ears.
• Argumentative Sexual Tension: This comic cites this trope equally the road to the best possible sex.

• Benevolent Conspiracy: "Propaganda" posits one past processed 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 Push: Non serving this human'due south wife the right meal.
• Better Than Sex activity: Television, apparently. Sex is considered to exist "almost as good equally 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 then he tin can save the sex workers, to threatening to smash the moon into the World if he isn't granted access to Globe's women, to enervating the key to the city because "I just stopped Superman from killing anybody", to sexually harassing a woman he's saving, to running for president and and so threatening to kill everyone with lasers if forced to abide past term limits.
  • One comic really has the Kyrptonians invoke this by sending Kyrptonian Babies to alien planets to destroy rival civilizations. Oddly enough, this comic defied the trope by having the now reformed Kyrptonians discover that Superman never had a gamble to get a tyrant just considering he was as well busy fighting all of Earth's Omnicidal Maniacs.
• Bigger Is Better in Bed: At starting time, the signal of this strip.
  • Actually a Running Gag in the comic, men volition obsess over penis size, while women volition prefer average size, since that doesn't involve getting torn open.
• Birds of a Feather: Subverted in "Uncomfortable Truthasaurus". It's kinda cruel, only those two nerds who date each other? They want, like all people, someone hot and with improve social status than themselves.
• Bizarre Conflicting Biology: It makes giving the aliens i meg children in exchange for their avant-garde medical knowledge a poor decision in hindsight.
• Black-and-White Morality: Invoked and deconstructed in this strip, where the lack of articulate morality causes humanity to make a horrific conspicuously evil monster just to make things black and white.
• Black Box: Referenced by this strip well-nigh Polish hand magic. Some things really just are the way they are for literally no reason that humans would discover satisfying.
• Blue-and-Orangish Morality: Exploited by the Neuroethecist to avoid getting arrested by Wonder Woman.

  Wonder Adult female: "Should I punish you or what?"

  Neuroethecist: "It'southward complicated! Everything'due south complicated! Ahahahahahahahaha!"

• Black One-act: A lot. A real lot.
• Bolt of Divine Retribution: On occasion.
• Born Unlucky: Little Sprat, who tin can only eat Unflavored Deproteinated Soy Slurry due to inheriting both his father'south inability to consume fatty and his mother's inability to swallow lean.
• Brain Monster: Parodied, where a Mad Scientist discovers that his creation, a T-Rex with its brain in a behemothic jar, invokedis annihilation but terrifying.
• Breadstuff, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Plenty of examples. Here's a literal case.
• Breast Expansion: Taken Upward to Eleven here, where someone who finds a genie wishes that a woman'south 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 Md.
• Buried Alive: And given a funeral too!
• Book Dumb: The people Jesus preached to. When he caused rock to produce new free energy out of nada (a violation of the Key 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 than wine though ...
• Call-Back:
• 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 popular music instead of answering them.
• Cheerful Funeral: In this strip, an quondam 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 political party rather sombre.

  "Wait at Dad, keeping on dancing. What a trooper."

• Breast Burster: With puppies.
• Clarke's Constabulary for Girls' Toys: Pointed out hither.
• Cleavage Window: I possible explanation for this is explored here.
• Coming-Out Story: With a genuinely unexpected twist.

  Information technology's okay! The less concentrated your love gets, the stronger it- [SLAM!]

• Compensating for Something:
• Courtroom Antic
• 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 capricious at all-time and evil at worst, and where whatever innovation automatically leads to The Terminate of the Globe every bit We Know It (no matter how innocuous or even benign 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 Heed. Sadly, it immediately flew into the Sun and burned upwardly.
• Crapsaccharine Earth: On occasion.
• Create Your Ain Villain:
  • And we mean literally:
• Creepy Crows: They are an omen for death, but non the simply bird you desire to avoid.
• Creepy Child: Here.
• Weep Laughing: Doctor Apocalypse does this while vowing to terminate 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 "Disuse" and the "Long Night" phases are caused past mod art.
• Dating Catwoman: Though not with Catwoman herself.
• Bargain with the Devil: Several; usually it turns out the mortal was cheated.
  • Subverted in i strip almost prayer. If you pray to God, he merely says he may or may non fulfill your wish in a way thats indistinguishable from your own efforts or random risk. If you pray to Satan, he shows up and asks if you desire to be paid in large or pocket-sized bills.
• Expiry Earth: Earth, for SUPERMAN's species. They sent overpowered babies to worlds in order to have over those worlds, only later they had a civilization shift. In each and each world they went to get superpowered beings back, they had all been tyrants of that globe... except Earth. Globe have so many supervillians that Superman was merely too decorated keeping Earth intact. The Kryptonians end up taking Superman back habitation for treatment.

  Superman: "They're everywhere! Evil is everywhere! AAAAHHHHHHH!"

• Detective Mole: Here:

  Gonna kill your wife tonight. With this machete. I'm the detective.
  Non detective Larson! He'due south the detective!

• Digital Piracy Is Evil: Under the Code of Hammurabi, the punishment for IP Theft is dismemberment.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
• Disposable Sex Worker: Strippers hate aggrandizement more than anyone else.
• Agonizing Statistic:
• Muddied Communists: Bob Barker used to be 1.
• Dirty Old Man:
• Indomitable 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, simply the same chief applies. Superman and Batman both invoke this trope at points.
• Dramatic Gun Cock: In this console
• Dream Inside a Dream: Taken to ridiculous extremes.
• Driven to Suicide:
• Practice Not Practise This Absurd Thing: invoked Don't smoke, considering you lot don't accept super lungs like Superman.
• Dying Declaration of Hate: This comic, which chronicles the process of math theory going from being rejected by academic one-time guard because information technology challenges the conventional wisdom of the time to becoming the accustomed truth, features a member of the academic old baby-sit denouncing it on his deathbed.

  I will never understand it. I will never believe it. As I go into death, with my terminal jiff I spit upon your theorem.

• Early Installment Weirdness: Early comics frequently lacked a votey. Somewhen, 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 information technology.
• Earth All Along: There's quite a few comics that portray the increasingly ridiculous results of the introduction of a applied science or concept. Occasionally, the dial line volition exist that our world is the finish event 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 so, you lot already knew that.

• Like shooting fish in a barrel Route to Hell:
• Eats Babies: Used so ofttimes, you'd recall information technology's Author Appeal or something.
• The Eeyore: He'southward the one under the paper bag.
• Elder Abuse: "My inquiry on os 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: Accept no fear. Your emails, documents, and personal photos are securely stored in the 'phant.

• Erotic Dream: Epictetus trained himself to take one whenever something bad happens to him, whether it's something big like getting banished from Rome or something small like being told his soapbox is informal. His fantasy is a Three-Fashion with Venus and Helen of Troy.

  Epictetus:"Exist gentle, ladies. I've never washed that before!"

• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • An economist in this strip proposes a scheme to a supervillain league. Information technology entails people, bearded as heads of their regime'southward central banks, running out of said banks at the aforementioned 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 SadisticChoice child murderer encourages his victims to run away subsequently listening to their mother's rant.
  • In a like scenario, a crazed-looking man with a gun orders a man to choose which of his two children will alive. "Billy dies," says the father without hesitation, explaining that Sally, as a girl, has a college life expectancy and somewhat higher boilerplate happiness, and is also three years Billy'southward junior, giving her the greater number of "quality-adapted life years." The criminal unties the children (but not the father) and tells them he's distressing 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 nil confronting other races, he just doesn't think they work well together. Despite the fact that they don't even accept any skin whatever more, and he tin only (supposedly) tell what race they are based on os structure.

    Necromancer (clearly dismayed): I'm planning to create an epoch of darkness, simply not a racist 1.

    Racist skeleton: Preferences are not racist, sir!

• Everybody Hates Mathematics: Being a math teacher is fifty-fifty more hated than a racist fascist homophobe who sues struggling single moms and kicks puppies and eats babies.
• "Everybody Laughs" Ending: Here.
• Anybody Is Jesus in Purgatory: In-universe, the victim of a Accept That! in this comic.
• Everything's Better with Dinosaurs: ...And funnier besides! ^note Even political cartoons.
• Evil Analogue: Carl Sagan has one. Nobody liked him.

  Evil Carl Sagon:"There is carbon in your torso that was shat out of Hitler'southward ass!"

• The Evils of Free Will: In this comic, a red-haired woman accidently convinces her greyness-haired friend of this.

  Grey-haired friend: "Wow. You simply cured me of any hedonic tendencies. Man must be governed. With the whip if necessary."

• Evil Instructor: This one murders students who give the wrong respond on tests.
• Exact Words:
• 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 human action. The police officer handcuffs the woman and tells her his hands are only 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 y'all 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 = Decease
  • Eurasian Kestrels = Nobody will ever love y'all
  • Barnacle Goose = Hire is Due
  • Crested Ibis = Your zipper is undone
  • Dwarf Cassowary = Yous need to stop drinking
  • Fulvous Whistling Duck = Your spouse hates you.
  • Passenger Pigeon = The time machine but worked a niggling.
• The Film of the Book: Played for Laughs Hither.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: Going to the Renaissance Fair to Roleplay equally a Victorian Time Traveler.
• Fling a Light into the Future: Gone catastrophically wrong.
• For Happiness: I strip kickoff out with featuring a Straw Character version of For Happiness. He soon becomes a Totalitarian Utilitarian, nevertheless.
• For Science!!:
• Freak Out: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!
• Freakier Than Fiction: Lies. Just add a monkey dressed as Hitler to anything, and information technology becomes stranger and fictional.
• Full-Circle Revolution: Unsaid to be the result of all revolutions.
• Funny Animal: Inflatable Bananapig!
• Future Imperfect: Invoked. Apparently, Don Quixote'southward truthful exploits were quite different from what is written on the novel. ^note The Aesop is: Always call back to be polite to your sidekicks!

• Gag Penis:
  • The inevitable effect of the invention of genetic engineering. Men inevitably requested that their sons exist 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 sexual activity. This escalates until the human race literally morphs into walking, talking genitals, at which point the adjacent generation end upwardly every bit normal humans once again, as their parents are no longer capable of using the computers that altered their Dna. These kids end up being the near miserable generation in human history, every bit they've literally been built-in and raised by giant genitals, and the psychosexual implications are disastrous.
  • Another has a man who finds a genie wish that penis size be adamant past working out like a normal muscle rather than basically random. This leads to a disastrous population crash within a decade as men chop-chop commencement working out so much that sex becomes impossible.
• Gambit Pileup: A psychological experiment ends in this. 3 people each conducted an experiment on each other. The first i did so in the guise of conducting an experiment on students, and others pretended to be office 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:
• 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.
• 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 Affections:
• Good Girls Avoid Abortion: The Children's Book, "Safer Sex activity Thru Abortion", has not fared well on the market place.
• Become Mad from the Revelation: Subverted. Georg Cantor is thought to take gone mad trying to pursue mathematical infinity, merely in truth his mental breakdown only occurred after his peers shunned him.
  • One man uses this to last longer during sex past debating the existance of free will by himself. The ensuing despair ways that he wont climax too fast.
• Gravity Is Only a Theory:
• 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 desire macaroni and cheese, but I also want nobility. Please foul this food with truffle oil.

• Heart Is an Awesome Power:
• Hero Does Public Service: Deconstructed with lodge calculating more than and more efficient means for Superman's might to be used and taking him for granted.
• Heroes Want Redheads: The votey contains such data.
  • The punchline in this i too.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Salve YOURSELF, MAMMAL!
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: A great bargain of the humor is this.
• Hitler Ate Saccharide: Y'all know who else didn't floss? You know, probably.
• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: A possible reason is given hither.
• Historical Domain Grapheme:
  • 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 upwards similar Jesus and Buddha and scaring him at dark. This way he assembly theism with his night terrors.

  Parent in Costume: "Boo! I'chiliad Jesus Christ! I'one thousand here from 2000 years ago to tell you how to run your life! Boo!"

  • This child, meanwhile, likes to interrupt Church to taunt Jesus.
• How Nosotros Got Here: Frequently used, where the punchline comes in the form of a panel happening but before the events of the remainder of the comic.
• Humans Are Bastards:
• Humans Through Alien Eyes: Frequently. For example, hither they explain humanity's obsession with flowers equally a prove of say-so over plants.
• Hunting the Well-nigh Unsafe Game: As seen here, the real most dangerous game is playing tennis with lit dynamite while riding a behave.
• Hurricane of Puns: Chemistry puns no less.

• Incommunicable Task Instantly Accomplished: What if God took away sex?
• Intellectual Beast: "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 Large "NO!" and tells his wife to not wait at his browser history...so her surprise, it'southward all merely "old people stuff". The votey, nonetheless, has him limited relief that the quondam people stuff got her to stop scrolling downward lower...
• It Makes Sense in Context: Some of the panels and/or the dialogue in them tin can exist really bizarre before y'all read the explanation, or in some cases the bonus panel.
• It Will Never Catch On: The net was just a fad. The existent large matter is chewing on skunks.
• I Want Grandkids: Marrying off children does that.
• Jackass Genie: This strip. Could be considered to overlap with Literal Genie likewise if not for the tertiary wish.
• Just Friends: Peer reviewed?
• Kick the Dog: "I'm beginning to wonder if Fred had an ulterior motive in buying me a puppy for Christmas".
• Male monarch in the Mountain: This one'southward votey claims it is George Washington.
• King Incognito: Parodied in "Royalty", where the male monarch in hiding is severely, evidently 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 lot WHO ENJOYED THIS JOKE".
  • This joke almost statistics also has a similar reference in the Alt Text.
• Big Ham: Has happened a few times.
• LEGO Genetics: Subverted and mocked.
• Lensman Arms Race: Analysed and taken to its logical conclusion.
• Literal Metaphor: As role of the Escalating Punchline, "Isn't this a roughshod bike?" "Oh, that reminds me..."
• Long Runner: More four thousand strips.
• The Lost Lenore: This male parent, when asked by his girl what "1 + ane" equals, goes into a monologue about how he believes he will see his dead married woman again one day. He fifty-fifty goes so far every bit to state that if the just thing afterwards death were Cessation of Being (in other words if his wife was gone forever), he would just kill himself and exist done with it all. Or as he puts it:

  "If her being weren't written on the book of truth, waiting some solar day to be read again, no quantity of hope could keep me living in this vast cold universe."

• Love Dodecahedron: Or rather, "Lust Infinigon."
• Depression Culture, High Tech: Particle Physics is an sometime science.
• Madness Mantra: I know what you did.
• Mad Doctor: When Physician Sloan says you lot accept 2 weeks to alive, you have two weeks to live!
• Magic Feather: Inverted in this comic. "The failure was in you lot all along!"
  • Subverted: No, it actually is an evil artifact that now owns you.
• Magic Versus Science: Bullets Win.
• Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex: Gender-inversion in this strip, forth with A Human being Is Always Eager.
• Mathematician'southward Reply: Literally.
• Metaphorgotten: Dad never really bothered to explain his metaphors.
• Men Can't Keep House: Or even feed themselves, plain.
• Melodrama: Funky Fries ... But AT WHAT Toll???
  • $3.99
• Mind Screw: One strip shows an alternate universe where existence is impossible, populated by sentient beings composed of absolutely nothing.
• Miscarriage of Justice: To engagement, Sherlock Homes has sent 439 innocent men to the gallows.
• Mistaken for Gay: Inverted, though it's non articulate until you lot read the votey.
• Mistaken for Racist: When Lex Luther posions a community that happens to be fabricated up of ethnic minorities, Superman suspects it's non a coincidence.

  Lex Luther: "I just wanted to kill people!"

  Superman: *rolls optics* "Yeah, a certain type of people."

• Mix-and-Friction match Homo: 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 bodacious to bear male person children, his thought of what women consider a approving not having kept up with the times.
• Modesty Bedsheet: Lampshaded in this comic. Click the big ruddy button (the 'votey') under the comic.
• Monster Clown: STAY SAFE!
• Moon-Landing Hoax:
• Moving the Goalposts: When God closes a door, don't climb out the open window.
• Muggles Exercise It Ameliorate: How do you stop a werewolf from going on a rage-fueled killing spree whenever the moon is total? Psychopharmacology! ^note The medication referred to in the comic is an anticonvulsant used in treating epileptic seizures, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder.
• Mundane Fabricated Awesome: Copyrights.
  • A woman makes a high-stakes game out of opening containers to check if they are full of erstwhile dairy.
• Mundane Utility: The best manner for Superman to relieve the world is to catechumen his powers into cheap energy by spinning a large magnet around actually fast... at least up to a point.
• My Beloved Smother: Public Health Advocates are this to anybody else. Fortunately they lack legislative ability.
• My Brain Is Large: Horton, from the very first comic. Sadly, two thirds of his encephalon was comprised of the little known "stupid lobe".

  Horton:"Two times Two is 3."

• My God, What Have I Done?: Quondam Human Richards reacts this way when his try to prevent his neighborhood from being gentrified backfires. He haunted the neighborhood considering he wanted to lower the property value and scare rich people away so the poor renters could stay in that location, 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 Woods, then a Calvinist Genie will grant y'all 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 twenty-four hours of your lives. And if you alive to come across your grandchildren, you didn't work hard enough. As well your actions have no event on whether or not God decides to let you lot into Heaven, but finding a Genie is probably a bad sign. And no wishing for anything fun!
• Overnice Hat: Jokes with the Pope often revolve around his hat. This is a good example.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
• Nightmare Retardant: In-universe. The nigh 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, and then his scribe got the last express joy by depicting the mighty knight as a blundering fool.
• Noodle Implements:
• Nostalgia Filter: Addressed here, here, and here.
  • Likewise parodied here.
• Not So Above It All: Most of the time voties with Zack'south married woman in them have her (and whatever kids they take 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 Homo! He thinks he is tickling criminals into submission with a bloom. He's actually stabbing them to decease considering someone switched his blossom with a knife and he never noticed the difference.
• Obviously Evil: Inverted here and subverted here.
• One-Two Punchline: At that place's an unabridged bonus second-punchline console accessible past hovering over a ruby-red push at the end of the strip. Many of the main strips too accept multiple punchlines, specially from the time before Zach started cartoon voteys. Lampshaded in this strip, which had three punchlines in the main strip, and then got a votey fatigued years later maxim nada merely "Exercise you really want another punchline, yous greedy bastard?"
• I-Discussion Title: A few of the strips, along with being Recycled Titles:
  • Multiverse:
  • Words
  • Wisdom
• Only Six Faces: Though in this example, it doesn't really thing.
• Opposites Concenter: Truthasaurus from "Uncomfortable Truthasaurus" explains you, kids, that this is a common misconception. Everyone wants someone hot and someone rich.
• Original Position Fallacy:
• Overly Long Gag: Tends to popular up (see Dream Inside a Dream) and, when information technology does, the bonus panel tends to show the artist looking at his now bedraggled/withered/burnt paw after having drawn that many panels.
• Oxymoronic Beingness: The sentient nothing that populates the Nothingverse.
• Painting the Medium: Correct here, subverting your expectations over again.
• 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 information technology goes downhill from at that place.

  What are "hippies"?
  The virtually violent humans in history.

• Pink Elephants: "If I drink less, I'll stop having brilliant hallucinations, Chuck."
• Poe'south Constabulary: Lampshaded in the votey for Bobby and the Gurg.

  Dearest Voltaire's Ghost, please permit everyone recognize this as irony.

• Poke the Poodle: This strip.

  "Since nigh devils are actually angels fallen from Heaven, they don't actually have a good sense of how to torture."

• Popcultural Osmosis: Schrodinger's True cat
• Prank Telephone call: Inverted with this one, where the victim turns information technology effectually on the caller.
• Precious Puppies: Using Heart as an awesome power.
• Prisoner'due south Dilemma: Discussed.
• The Professor Is Crying Again: Deliberately invoked in this comic, where the volume of tears cried past a scientist is used past writers to gauge how inaccurate they are.
• Prophecy Twist: Played with here.
• Punctuation Changes the Pregnant: A "relationship tip" recommends clever comma placement to produce honest compliments. Lie: "You have a body like Adonis." Truth: "Y'all take a torso, similar Adonis."
• Puppeteer Parasite:
  • "I got the Blues!"
• Racist Grandma: employed as a tool hither.
• Rage Against the Heavens: There's a reason why we're not observant enough.
• Raising the Steaks: How the war was lost.
• The Existent Heroes: They're much easier to impale.
• "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 equally a group - are garbage. I would have to create new mathematics simply to draw how dimensionless your characters are. You lot are and 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 unlike novel. Also your beard sucks.

  • This human being can read his friend like an open book.
• Reckless Sidekick: Agreeing to be Batman'south sidekick IS pretty reckless.
• Recurring Grapheme: Several:
  • Batman (and some of his villains).
  • Superman.
  • The POTUS is most invariably a black, bearded, baldheaded, bespectacled human being.
  • The Zorblaxian aliens.
  • God (fatigued as a communion wafer, or possibly because His form is incomprehensible to humans.)
  • Jesus.
  • Two young girls (i blackness with glasses, one white), typically with the quondam initiating a philosophical word.
• Recycled Title: Some strips share a proper name:
  • Multiverse:
  • Words
  • Wisdom
• 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 apparent 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'south what makes sex activity with them great.

• Robot Buddy: This i is a Yandere.
• Rule of Absurd: A number of punchlines revolve effectually the idea that, for engineers, Rule of Cool overrides all other considerations.
  • For scientists besides.
• 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 fatigued, he's naked (if he's in the votey. In the bodily strip its more 50/l).
  • The votey on this comic, in the site comments. More often than not considering it was left up for weeks.
  • Graph jokes.
  • Absolutist dystopian what-if jokes usually involving listen control, hive-mind, sociological/socioeconomic experiments and alternative forms of sex. Zach is rather fond of destroying club.
  • Aliens (chosen Zorblaxians) looking downward on homo society and customs.
    • The aforementioned aliens trying to make kidnapped humans mate.
  • Adultery.
  • Two children having a philosophical chat 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 practical to everyday life. For instance, regulatory capture.
  • Having fun when parenting (at the expense of the kids). Among others, in that location are two specific routines:
    • Child asks something, parent explains, kid applies explanation (or other parent asks "what did you mother/begetter teach yous"); applied here to using punctuation to explain menstrual cycles.
    • Good parenting vs. effective parenting.
  • Harsh twist endings.
  • Option-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 "task in finance".
  • In the voteys, unfavorably comparing himself to the xkcd guy.
    • Zach laughing at his own sometimes incredibly obscure/convoluted joke theme saying "in that location's not enough _____ jokes!" or "people/anybody dearest(s) _____ jokes!".
    • Zach drawing himself with a broken paw afterwards 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 (especially vicious here). After his kid 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.
    • "Sometime man Wienersmith shakes his cane at y'all" on comics that become preachy.
  • Economists are evil.
    • In the same vein, engineers are completely dispassionate and utilize 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.
• Safe Word: One strip teaches us that introducing safewords in nonsexual contexts is a fun manner of creeping people out.
• The Scapegoat: An Imagine Spot from the President had the Economic Whipping Boy, who would exist punished whenever bad economical news occurs, allowing the President to focus on problems he could really exert control over.

  President: What's this?! Lots of new jobs were created, simply the unemployment rate went up?! How does that even brand 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 gild to science and engineering, flying Globe to Zorblax Prime with giant rocket boosters, and blasting the Zorblaxian Homeworld to oblivion with a behemothic laser.
• Seen It All: This guy, where sexual activity is concerned.
• Self-Defeating Prophecy: The human in Time to come two decides he does not have to strive for anything when his future self comes back with a time auto. This causes said future self to disappear.
• Self-Deprecation: Adequately common in the mouse-over bonus strips. Frequently this shows the artist's partner puncturing his pretensions or mocking him.

  Garfield: "I dearest lasagna."

  Zach: "And and then he fucking died!"

  • Taken Upwardly to Eleven in this comic's votey.

  Zach, drawing Comics at three AM: Nothing I've ever drawn is funny!

  • Whenever he has a guest artist, he mentions how much better this creative person's piece of work is compared to his own.
  • One comic calls attention to how redhaired men have it worse than anyone due to being seen equally unattractive and having to worry virtually how any daughters they have will be seen every bit very bonny. Zach is, of course, a redhead. And a few years later on 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 grapheme in any given strip a redhead similar himself.
  • In this comic, the punchline is just someone telling a self-employed artist, who looks exactly similar Zach, that their comics suck, followed past a Beat Panel of Zach crying a unmarried 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 adult female who slept with him invoked it, knowing he would believe the line actually worked.
• Self-Made Orphan: The Headless Horsemen here.
• Shooting Superman: A cheat shoots Invincible Human. It works.

  Caption: We were informed at the funeral that Invincible Man had no existent powers.

• Shout-Out:
• Shown Their Work: Around 2010, many of the strips punchlines began involving knowledge very sophisticated bookish concepts, ranging from philosophy of math to quantum calculating.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Superman is told something that requires a piddling introspection. And then naturally, he punches the dude in the face.
• Dizzy Reason for State of war: 2 soldiers die in battle, and Saint Peter has to determine which 1 was on the right side ...

  Get-go Soldier: "We were fighting them considering their form of Economy is not equally Market-Oriented as ours, according to some metrics!"

  Second Soldier: "Nosotros were fighting them because the utilise 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!"

• Slippery Slope Fallacy: One comic has a girl ask her male parent if there is a puppy heaven. Her father gain to point out that if he says yep, it becomes impossible to determine what doesn't become a heaven, eventually suggesting that at that place is a meme heaven for ideas that die. And then the father uses the fallacy once again to prove the exact reverse thing - that since a meme heaven is ridiculous, so is a heaven for slightly more than 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.
• Modest Reference Pools: Invoked for politics and history here by showing how people'southward small-scale reference pools for history affects political soapbox.
• Smarter Than Yous Look: Odie is an instance 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 every bit Hell: Here'southward one example.
  • And another.
• Space Whale Aesop: Math may seem too abstruse to be worth learning, but ignoring information technology volition come up back to seize with teeth 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:
• Stating the Simple Solution: A medieval variation in this comic.
• Stealth Cigarette Commercial: Superman subtext with this
• Harbinger Feminist:
• Subverted Rhyme Every Occasion: Best shown here.

  I find a piddling rhyme can really accept the edge off bad news. Which reminds me, I've been meaning to tell you... there once was a homo from schmonorrhea. You have AIDS. Ucket.

• Subverted Trope: Too many to count; one-half the strip's sense of humour comes from doing this in a bizarre manner.
  • Double Subversion: Many, many gags involving something turning out to non be what you remember it is, and then turning out to be what you thought information technology was after all.
    • Zig-Zagging Trope: Usually reserved for multi-console, but information technology's been pulled off in one panel+ text also.
• Sufficiently Avant-garde Aliens: The Zorblaxians are capable of interstellar travel and several strips accept them create humanity outright.
• Suicide every bit Comedy: Quite a few times, similar this comic, which also falls under What an Idiot! and Tarot Motifs (if you look closely).
• Super-Cute Superpowers: One comic has a little daughter guarding Fort Knox who has the ability to make puppies appear. Which she uses to deadly issue. Considering she never specified where the puppies will announced from. Such equally from inside the villain.
• Superior Species: The Zorblaxians in several strips, such as one that reveals they accept souls while humans don't.
• Surprisingly Realistic Consequence:
• Take a 3rd Pick: "I have a fantastic attorney."
• Take That!: Often accompanied by a "BAM!" in the Author's Notes.
• Tampering with Food and Drink:
• Teens Are Short: This college freshman looks more similar a high school freshman next to his dad.
• Teeny Weenie: Double Subverted. The human being with the world's smallest penis gets plenty of girls considering beingness a tape-holder is impressive. Still, the same can not be said for the man with the 2nd smallest penis.
• Terrible Pick-Upwards Lines: A man goes around using a stupid pun every bit a pickup line, because it once worked. It turns out the one woman it worked on intentionally acted similar she was flattered, just to come across what he's exercise in response.
• That'south What She Said: While the consequences were corking, it was worth information technology.
• Recall of the Children!: Invoked past a Senator regarding gay matrimony, and then twisted with Insane Troll Logic past the reporter ("Got it. And so your lawmaking of ethics is to oppose things that are hard to explain to kids"), with an appropriate headline and votey based on that logic.
• Time Travel for Fun and Profit: The existent reason why Scrooge was and then generous at the end of A Christmas Carol.
• Too Dumb to Alive: Also dumb to die.
  • In Retrospect, the gate seemed foreboding.
• Besides Dumb to Fool: About verbatim.
• Also Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: An Cyberspace virgin has a soul that's "worse than the Necronomicon".
• Thanatos Gambit: Several examples of how to utilize this just to mess around with people, such as here. Or like this. Or this.
• There Tin Exist Merely One: The Ultimate Diet. It even says so in the votey.
• This Isn't Sky:
• 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 scientific discipline terms from being appropriated past homeopathic remedies. Information technology didn't work.
• Unreliable Narrator: One comic posits that Don Quixote was a legitimate bad ass who defeated the last of Kingdom of spain'due south dragons, who was hiding in a windmill, merely because he was such a massive wiggle to his chronicler Cervantes, Cervantes depicted the brave and powerful knight as a unmeant idiot.
• Unsound Effect: Lamp!
• Unwanted Spouse: "Countdown to Divorce: 25 months, xiv days, 3 hours, 27 minutes, 22 seconds.".
• Vengeance Feels Empty: Inverted. Not pursuing revenge feels maddening.
• Virgin Sacrifice: Invoked and so subverted here.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Zach's Author Avatar in the bonus panels.
• Weapons-Class Vocabulary: After declining to defeat humans, aliens finally resort to weapons class information as final weapon against humans.
  • Human being says that being rejected from group causes actual physical hurting to the masochism group that is kick him out. He seemed to relish the pain, however.
• We Come in Peace — Shoot to Impale discussed here.
• Wedgie: The greatest of all time.
• Weirdness Conscience: Here.
• What We Now Know to Be True: A Female parent'southward Beloved: Nature'south Deadliest Poison
• When All Y'all Take is a Hammer…:
  • Used word for word in one strip to explain the lengths some men will get to for sexual gratification.
  • Goal: promote critical thinking and rational thought in children. Trouble: you're a processed company. Solution: label the smallest size of processed "fun size", instilling children with a healthy distrust of those in ability.
• Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: Or "Asshole"?
• Who's on First?: 57 panels worth of chemical science puns.
  • Horribly subverted hither.
• Windmill Crusader: Parodied in a comic where Don Quixote angers his biographer subsequently killing a dragon within a windmill.
• Wishing for More than 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 commonage 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 person folly of claiming that there is such a matter as collective female person follies.
• Worm in an Apple tree: Isaac Newton got the idea for gravity after stealing information technology from an apple worm (depicted as an earthworm with spectacles, in a tree).
• Worth It: On the alt panel of this comic, equally well as the alt console on this i.
• Would Hurt a Kid: God, plain, according to this comic's votey.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Invoked as a style of coping with simple problems.
• You lot Cloned Hitler!: Now on Deconstructive Parody season! Check it here.
• Zen Slap: According to the comic, for budhist students who fail to attain enlightment, their teachers demonstrate to them the sound of one mitt clapping by, well, this trope.
• Zig-Zagging Trope: What is this, center schoolhouse?

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