YMMV / Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

• Alternative Character Interpretation: In this strip, a father explains to his son the true nature of the original PacMan's plot.
• Anvilicious:
  • Religion makes you stupid and/or evil and makes absolutely zero sense, as opposed to science. Also, all creationists are idiots. Then again, the scientists tend to use the For Science! label as an excuse for acting like dicks.
  • Economists are evil.
  • Morality doesn't exist and animals are even worse monsters than humans.
  • Humans Are Morons (presumably excluding the author) and most of what we like and do can be attributed to stupidity.
  • Bayesians are VERY stupid.
• Broken Aesop: There are three strips dedicated solely as Take Thats! to Bayesians. One problem; they all contradict each other.
  • “Bayesian” portrays Bayesian Probability as an irrational tool for justifying their perceptions. Except, “2014-05-23” portrays it as as a tool warped by probability, instead of the other way around.
  • “Blood of the Bayesian” portrays Bayesians as attributing parts of a single effect to smaller, more common explanations, Occam's Razor notwithstanding. The contradiction is that it portrays Bayesians as illogically inflexible, ala Scully Syndrome, resulting in them not discovering their own vampirism. But with “2014-05-23”, Bayesians are portrayed as suicidally flexible, to the point where they completely ignore all signs of worsening intoxication.
  • There are two strips pertaining to Bayesian Probability not mentioned above; Bayesophilia and Bayesianism. These fail as Take Thats! for their own reason; they completely muck up the math behind Bayesian Probability.
    • “Bayesophilia” attempts to compare diametrically opposed events rather than comparing the probability of concurrent events, which is closer to Frequentism than Bayesian. “Bayesianism”, however, takes the cake. It is such a fucking batshit Strawman of every single section of the Bayesian method that it makes you wonder if SMBC saw the equation, got a headache trying to wrap his head around it, and decided to retaliate against the threat with his very own soapbox.
• Crosses the Line Twice: This strip about Charlie Brown finally kissing the red-headed girl goes into unfunny territory... then the votey has the author having a similar reaction as the reader likely had by that point.
  • Similarly, this strip is pretty damn weird... then the Votey has Zack's gleeful reaction as Kelly is standing behind him, absolutely horrified.
  • This one which is in a very weird way also very sweet.
• Genius Bonus: Plenty.
  • In this strip, the suicidal boy is posed like the Hanged Man in tarot.
  • This one is a miniature parody of utilitarianism: a human society delivers its government over to a computer that orders them to do things according to the greatest overall happiness of society, only for a guy to come along who's so insanely easy to please that his personal happiness accounts for 95% of all the happiness in the world, with the result that everyone becomes enslaved to doing whatever he wants.
  • Punctuation's votey mentions having all the punctuation put on a single page at the end of the book for the reader to disseminate as they please. Timothy Dexter wrote a book that did just that in the 19th century.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The clickies of a few of his older comics have Zach express this. For example.
  • A 2006 comic states it will be hilarious in 20 years. More like 14.
  Now that it's May of 2016, we sure don't have to worry about three-fourths of the world's population dying of a lethal strain of the flu!
• Heartwarming Moments: Right here
• Hilarious in Hindsight: It's pretty funny to begin with, but just look at this comic, and then look at this and the associated page.
  • This comic becomes hilarious in the wake of DC's Final Crisis. Not only does Batman use a gun, but Mary Marvel goes punk-rocker psycho. Oddly prescient.
  • This comic about a literal sociopath as a superhero became similarly prescient when DC Comics introduced Ghost-Maker, a literal psychopath who decided to fight crime because it would offer him a challenge. Although Ghost-Maker hasn't been elected to the Senate. Yet.
  • One comic states about how bad redhaired men have it in comparison their daughters, obviously because Zach has red hair. It's even funnier if you know that he actually got a daughter a few years after this comic was made.
  • This comic has Spiderman being pulled into space and suffocating after latching onto an UFO with his web. A very similar scene happens at the beginning of Avengers: Infinity War.
• Less Disturbing in Context: "I gave a bunch of editors brain worms and now they do what I say!" ^note  She studies brain-parasites at a university and editors are interested in her work. She didn't use the parasites to mind-control them.
• Memetic Mutation: THOSE FUCKERS, OUR SHIT◊
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • I am free now.
  • "There is no ending because there is no such thing as a 'story.' There's just stuff that happens, and that stuff was considered to 'have meaning' in the mind of a short-lived species of apes.
  • Pac-Man has never been so disturbing.
• Paranoia Fuel: "Somewhere in here... is a CLOWN!"
  Hi, Billy...
• Seasonal Rot:
  • The comic is often seen as having gotten more political and righteous about the power of science while the strips numbered in the 100s or 200s.
  • Since roughly 2020, some have begun to see the comic as degrading from being comedic to the author directly lecturing the reader about his personal views and beliefs.
• Squick: An accidental version in this strip's Alt Text: "[...] I uploaded it with a typo in which the dad offers to taste his kid's sore throat."
• Tear Jerker:
  • Climate models aren't reductionist enough! We can recreate the first language using statistics!
  • Physics just produced an invisibility cloak! What has sociology done that comes anywhere near that?
  • Regret
  • "I'll try to get the [package] for next month."
  • 'It...doesn't look good.
    Weiner's Wife: You're horrible.
  • "Sure is cold out."
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: If not for the Hypocritical Humor in the final panel, this dentist's patient would practically be an Escapist Character. Come on, who hasn't wanted to make a rant very much like that to a lecturing dentist?
• The Woobie: "Happy Birthday to Me!"

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