Weinersmith Ill Try Again Next Month

Saturday Morning time 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. Usually appearing in "voteys", the bonus console beneath the comic, are the crazed, ever-naked writer and his long-suffering wife (and somewhen, children).

Much of the strip'due south humor comes from setting upwardly a state of affairs and and then subverting either the established premise or the audience's expectations, oft going with a Black One-act punchline. The cartoonist is self-described equally having the abilities of Gary Larson and a sexual activity offender.

Zach besides does videos under the name SMBC Theater. There'south less sociopathy in them, though. (Or more, depending on your bespeak 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!"

• Accuse the Witness: Hither. Charge the judge if there is nobody else to charge.
• Affably Evil: Felix, though it's debatable whether he knows how much misery he's causing.
• A God Am I: As boasted by, of all people, Jon Arbuckle , upon imbuing intelligence and consciousness to a creature that otherwise does non take such.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Parodied hither, where robots, upon achieving sentience, are shocked that humans thought they'd default to wanting to destroy humanity. Doubles as a Cocky-Fulfilling Prophecy, as this disturbs the robots so much they decide they HAVE to practice information technology.
• Aliens Are Bastards: The Zorblaxians have washed everything from eating humans to experimenting on humans to elementary 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 likewise hate condoms.
• All Women Are Lustful: To a slightly lesser extent than men manifestly, but not by much.
• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: Invoked. "The Tortoise And The Hare" is really a fable about small sample sizes.
• Alternative Graphic symbol Interpretation: invoked
• Alt Text: Near cartoons have a bonus panel, chosen the votey, that you run into if you mouse-over the red button at the bottom of the main cartoon. Chosen such because yous 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: Manifestly, economists.
• Amusing Alien: The Zorblaxians are ofttimes used as a stand-in for aliens in full 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 information technology'south revealed that Xorblaxian emotions modify much slower than humans, and that as a outcome they remember humans ruthless and numb. The votey hammers habitation the implication of this.

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

• Anti-Hero:
• 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, amid other things, a disaster kills anybody simply 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 man race to mindless point-and-click video games (unaware that have been preparing for this a long fourth dimension), or when aliens try to destroy the globe but for their lasers to get reflected dorsum 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 volition never stop being topical.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: The votey (seen by clicking the cerise push 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.
• Ascend to a Higher Airplane of Existence: Dungeons And Dragons is e'er the starting time step.
• Author Appeal:
  • The comic keeps returning to the thought that the universe is a simulation, and that there are probably more that one level upwards.
  • Multiple strips are about how amazing cheese is, from God stating the pregnant of life is cheese to people doting cheese rooms.
  • There's besides an obsession with the pope's lid.
• Author Filibuster: In-Universe, this is used every bit a punishment for Philosophers who become to Hell. They accept to read Atlas Shrugged 2, the sequel that gets longer for every page you read.

  Satan: "Every fourth dimension y'all 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 part (all in the strip proper; he's always naked in the voteys he shows up in, and that's where he by and large shows upward).
• Author Tract:
  • Many strips savage organized faith, in item Christianity. To be fair, Zach oft pokes fun at atheism/agnosticism in the same jiff. He's also not above taking a potshot at both simultaneously.
  • Zach likes to mock older people who remember the past equally being better noting information technology is either nostalgia, people in the past did terrible things like make black people use unlike bathrooms, or that the times that were really better were due to rare circumstances like the economical boom afterwards Earth War 2.
• Ax-Crazy: Star Trek Teleporter Operators. The one in the comic fifty-fifty has a Slasher Smile.
• The Baby Trap: Batman dislikes condoms.
• Back to Front end: Done many times as a course of comedic reveal.
• Bad Boss:
  • This 1 threw a fake Halloween Party just to fire someone.
• Bad Appointment: "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 permit us speak."
• Bad Santa: Sometimes kills adept kids to ensure his business organization doesn't suffer.
• Bait-and-switch: As said above, one of the comic'south claims to fame is subverting the audiences expectations, or fifty-fifty double-subverting them. Taken to ridiculous extremes (to the signal of self-parody) in this strip.
• Batman Can Exhale in Space: Merely 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 Virtually Dangerous Game (too a subversion of... yeah).
• Shell Panel: Four in this comic.
• Beautiful All Forth: Parodied here, where someone tells a woman she's suddenly beautiful after she took off her drinking glass and permit 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 all-time possible sex.

• Benevolent Conspiracy: "Propaganda" posits i by processed companies, to promote rational thinking and skepticism in children, by labeling the smallest size of candy with the Not-Indicative Name "fun size". Hey, When All You lot Accept is a Hammer…
• Berserk Push button: Non serving this man's wife the correct meal.
• Meliorate Than Sex: Tv, apparently. Sex is considered to be "almost every bit good as TV," merely it "depends on the station", plain.
• Beware the Superman: A Running Gag in the comic is Superman abusing his powers, ranging from setting fire to brothels so he tin salve the sex workers, to threatening to blast the moon into the Earth if he isn't granted admission to World'southward women, to demanding the central to the city considering "I just stopped Superman from killing everyone", to sexually harassing a adult female he'southward saving, to running for president and so threatening to kill everyone with lasers if forced to abide by term limits.
  • 1 comic actually 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 detect that Superman never had a run a risk to become a tyrant simply considering he was too decorated fighting all of Earth'southward Omnicidal Maniacs.
• Bigger Is Improve 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 adopt average size, since that doesn't involve getting torn open up.
• Birds of a Plumage: Subverted in "Uncomfortable Truthasaurus". It's kinda barbarous, but those ii nerds who date each other? They desire, like all people, someone hot and with ameliorate social condition than themselves.
• Baroque Alien Biology: It makes giving the aliens one one thousand thousand 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 clear morality causes humanity to make a horrific clearly evil monster but to make things black and white.
• Black Box: Referenced by this strip nigh Polish hand magic. Some things really just are the mode they are for literally no reason that humans would find satisfying.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Exploited past the Neuroethecist to avoid getting arrested past Wonder Adult female.

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

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

• Blackness One-act: A lot. A real lot.
• Bolt of Divine Retribution: On occasion.
• Born Unlucky: Piffling Sprat, who tin only swallow Unflavored Deproteinated Soy Slurry due to inheriting both his father'due south inability to swallow fatty and his female parent's disability to consume 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, Milk, Squick: Plenty of examples. Hither's a literal example.
• Chest Expansion: Taken Upwards to Eleven 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 time to come.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Or rather, Bunny Ears Doctor.
• Buried Live: And given a funeral too!
• Book Impaired: The people Jesus preached to. When he caused rock to produce new energy out of naught (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 than wine though ...
• Call-Dorsum:
• Cessation of Existence: Bad people only get to Hell for threescore seconds, later which they fade into not-existence. While they might accept some panicked questions in those 60 seconds, Satan sings teenage popular music instead of answering them.
• Cheerful Funeral: In this strip, an one-time adult female asks her family to celebrate her life instead of mourning her at her funeral. Unfortunately, she ends upwardly existence the victim of a series killer who tortured her to expiry, making the mood at her funeral party rather sombre.

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

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

  It'due south okay! The less concentrated your dearest 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. Information technology is also a world where God is capricious at best and evil at worst, and where whatsoever innovation automatically leads to The Stop of the World as We Know Information technology (no matter how innocuous or even benign that innovation might seem). In some cases though, the doctors are competent sociopaths, and the dysfunctional relationships piece of work due to nightmare fetishism.
• Crazy Cat Lady: This one combines thousands of cats to create a Hive Mind. Sadly, information technology immediately flew into the Dominicus and burned upwards.
• Crapsaccharine Globe: On occasion.
• Create Your Own Villain:
  • And we mean literally:
• Creepy Crows: They are an omen for decease, but non the merely bird you desire 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 Man Civilization follows this, and we are currently in the 628th bicycle. The "Expansion" and "Stabilization" phases are caused past Badgers, while the "Decay" and the "Long Night" phases are caused by modern fine 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 most 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 take chances. If you pray to Satan, he shows up and asks if you want to be paid in large or small bills.
• Decease World: Earth, for SUPERMAN'due south species. They sent overpowered babies to worlds in order to take over those worlds, simply later they had a civilization shift. In each and each world they went to go superpowered beings back, they had all been tyrants of that world... except World. Globe have so many supervillians that Superman was simply too decorated keeping World intact. The Kryptonians stop upward taking Superman back domicile 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'south the detective!

• Digital Piracy Is Evil: Under the Code of Hammurabi, the punishment for IP Theft is dismemberment.
• Asymmetric Retribution:
• Disposable Sex Worker: Strippers hate inflation more than than anyone else.
• Agonizing Statistic:
• Muddy Communists: Bob Barker used to be one.
• Muddied Old Man:
• Dogged Nice Guy: Mocked in this comic.
• Doublethink: Parodied in this strip.
• Double Standard: Discussed hither
• Double Standard: Rape, Divine on Mortal: Well ... Super on Normal, but the same main 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:
• Exercise Not Do This Cool Affair: invoked Don't smoke, because you don't accept super lungs like Superman.
• Dying Annunciation of Detest: This comic, which chronicles the process of math theory going from being rejected by bookish old guard considering it challenges the conventional wisdom of the time to becoming the accepted truth, features a member of the academic quondam guard denouncing it on his deathbed.

  I volition never understand information technology. I will never believe it. Every bit I go into death, with my final jiff 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 whatsoever years subsequently" one where he reacts to it.
• Earth All Along: At that place's quite a few comics that portray the increasingly ridiculous results of the introduction of a technology or concept. Occasionally, the punch line will exist that our earth is the end consequence of that bizarre sequence of events.

  Narrator: The globe is now largely a population of scared, confused people ruled past atavistic sociopaths with no sense of history, ethics, science, beauty or truth. But then, yous already knew that.

• Piece of cake Road to Hell:
• Eats Babies: Used so frequently, you'd think it's Author Appeal or something.
• The Eeyore: He's the one under the paper handbag.
• Elder Abuse: "My research on os density in the elderly is going extremely well."
• Elephants Never Forget: One strip describes elephants' infrequent memories existence used for file storage, nether the logic that since elephants never forget they can exist used as a very reliable manner 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.

• Erotic Dream: Epictetus trained himself to take 1 whenever something bad happens to him, whether it'south something big like getting banished from Rome or something pocket-size like being told his discourse is informal. His fantasy is a Iii-Way with Venus and Helen of Troy.

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

• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • An economist in this strip proposes a scheme to a supervillain league. It entails people, bearded as heads of their government's primal banks, running out of said banks at the aforementioned time, with a wheelbarrow of gilt bars, while screaming in panic. "It harms health and finance for generations," she says, "starves the poorest people first, and because information technology'due south a catastrophe of distrust, information technology 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 after listening to their mother's bluster.
  • In a like scenario, a crazed-looking human with a gun orders a man to cull which of his two children will live. "Billy dies," says the begetter without hesitation, explaining that Sally, equally a girl, has a higher life expectancy and somewhat college average happiness, and is also three years Billy's junior, giving her the greater number of "quality-adapted life years." The criminal unties the children (only non the father) and tells them he'south sorry their father is an economist.
  • The Necromancer in this strip is disgusted when i of the zombie skeletons he'south summoned refuses to piece of work with some of the other zombie skeletons, challenge he'southward got nothing confronting other races, he just doesn't think they piece of work well together. Despite the fact that they don't even accept whatsoever peel any more than, and he can only (supposedly) tell what race they are based on bone construction.

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

    Racist skeleton: Preferences are not racist, sir!

• Everybody Hates Mathematics: Beingness a math teacher is even more hated than a racist fascist homophobe who sues struggling single moms and kicks puppies and eats babies.
• "Everybody Laughs" Ending: Here.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: In-universe, the victim of a Take That! in this comic.
• Everything'southward Amend with Dinosaurs: ...And funnier too! ^annotation Even political cartoons.
• Evil Counterpart: Carl Sagan has ane. Nobody liked him.

  Evil Carl Sagon:"At that place is carbon in your body that was shat out of Hitler's ass!"

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

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

• Evil Instructor: This one murders students who requite the wrong answer 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 activity. The police officer handcuffs the woman and tells her his easily are simply obeying the frontal lobes in Congress.
• Expospeak Gag: In weaponized class.
• Optics Always Shut: Snobs tend to be drawn this way.
• Neglect O'Suckyname: Can foreclose you from naming an chemical element you lot discovered later on yourself.
  • Some other sorry twenty-four hour period 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 always dear yous
  • Barnacle Goose = Hire is Due
  • Crested Ibis = Your zipper is undone
  • Dwarf Cassowary = You demand to finish drinking
  • Fulvous Whistling Duck = Your spouse hates you.
  • Passenger Pigeon = The fourth dimension machine only worked a little.
• The Moving picture of the Volume: Played for Laughs Here.
• Fish out of Temporal H2o: Going to the Renaissance Fair to Roleplay as a Victorian Fourth dimension Traveler.
• Fling a Light into the Time to come: Gone catastrophically incorrect.
• For Happiness: 1 strip start out with featuring a Straw Grapheme version of For Happiness. He soon becomes a Totalitarian Commonsensical, nonetheless.
• For Science!!:
• Freak Out: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!
• Freakier Than Fiction: Lies. Only add a monkey dressed as Hitler to anything, and it becomes stranger and fictional.
• Full-Circle Revolution: Implied to be the result of all revolutions.
• Funny Animal: Inflatable Bananapig!
• Future Imperfect: Invoked. Plain, Don Quixote's true exploits were quite different from what is written on the novel. ^note The Aesop is: Ever think to be polite to your sidekicks!

• Gag Penis:
  • The inevitable event of the invention of genetic engineering. Men inevitably requested that their sons exist given increasingly big genitals, which leads to an arms race with women requesting larger vaginas in their daughters to proceed them from getting mutilated past sexual practice. This escalates until the human being race literally morphs into walking, talking genitals, at which point the next generation end upwardly as normal humans again, every bit 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, every bit they've literally been born and raised by giant genitals, and the psychosexual implications are disastrous.
  • Another has a human who finds a genie wish that penis size exist adamant by working out like a normal muscle rather than basically random. This leads to a disastrous population crash within a decade equally men quickly outset working out then much that sex activity becomes impossible.
• Gambit Pileup: A psychological experiment ends in this. Three people each conducted an experiment on each other. The first i did and 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 surround to America'due south reward.
• Geeky Turn-On:
• Girlfriend in Canada: Saint Anselm uses his ontological argument to show 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 barbarous, as fits the gag.
• God Test: A variant in ane comic strip. Unfortunately, they decided floating meant he was a witch instead of Jesus.
• Goggles Practice Cipher: The votey of this comic.
• Skillful Affections, Bad Angel:
• Adept Girls Avoid Ballgame: The Children's Book, "Safer Sexual practice Thru Abortion", has not fared well on the marketplace.
• 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 merely occurred after his peers shunned him.
  • One human being uses this to last longer during sex by debating the existance of free will past himself. The ensuing despair means that he wont climax too fast.
• Gravity Is Only a Theory:
• Groin Assail: I don't believe in hurting.
• One-half-Human Hybrid: Attempted and failed.
• Hates Everyone As: 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, merely I also desire dignity. Please foul this food with truffle oil.

• Heart Is an Awesome Power:
• Hero Does Public Service: Deconstructed with order calculating more than and more than efficient ways for Superman's might to be used and taking him for granted.
• Heroes Want Redheads: The votey contains such information.
  • The punchline in this one too.
• Heroic Sacrifice: SAVE YOURSELF, MAMMAL!
• Hilariously Calumniating Childhood: A slap-up bargain 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.
• Historical Domain Character:
  • The British Prime Government minister in this comic looks suspiciously similar Neville Chamberlain.
  • Hitler makes several appearances.
• Hollywood Atheist:
  • This parent will ensure his son grows upwardly to exist an atheist by dressing up similar Jesus and Buddha and scaring him at night. This way he assembly theism with his night terrors.

  Parent in Costume: "Boo! I'chiliad 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.
• How We Got Here: Ofttimes used, where the punchline comes in the class of a panel happening only earlier the events of the rest of the comic.
• Humans Are Bastards:
• Humans Through Alien Eyes: Oftentimes. For example, here they explain humanity's obsession with flowers as a evidence of dominance over plants.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: As seen here, the real most unsafe game is playing tennis with lit dynamite while riding a bear.
• Hurricane of Puns: CHEMISTRY puns no less.

• Impossible Task Instantly Accomplished: What if God took away sex?
• Intellectual Fauna: "The hedgefox knows fourteen things, and they're all pretty important".
• The Net Is for Porn: Er, in the futurity, The PornBox Is For Porn that is.
  • A Double Subversion in a comic where a man screams a Big "NO!" and tells his married woman to not look at his browser history...so her surprise, it'due south all just "old people stuff". The votey, however, has him limited relief that the sometime 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 baroque earlier y'all read the explanation, or in some cases the bonus console.
• It Will Never Catch On: The internet was merely a fad. The existent large 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 tertiary wish.
• Merely Friends: Peer reviewed?
• Kick the Canis familiaris: "I'1000 offset to wonder if Fred had an ulterior motive in ownership me a puppy for Christmas".
• King in the Mountain: This one's votey claims it is George Washington.
• Rex Incognito: Parodied in "Royalty", where the rex 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 Iii OF YOU WHO ENJOYED THIS JOKE".
  • This joke nearly statistics besides 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 decision.
• Literal Metaphor: As part of the Escalating Punchline, "Isn't this a vicious wheel?" "Oh, that reminds me..."
• Long Runner: More than 4 thousand strips.
• The Lost Lenore: This father, when asked past his daughter what "1 + 1" equals, goes into a monologue about how he believes he will see his dead wife once again 1 day. He fifty-fifty goes so far every bit to state that if the simply matter later on decease 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 every bit he puts it:

  "If her being weren't written on the book of truth, waiting some mean 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."
• Low Culture, High Tech: Particle Physics is an old science.
• Madness Mantra: I know what y'all 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, forth with A Man Is Always Eager.
• Mathematician'southward Answer: Literally.
• Metaphorgotten: Dad never really bothered to explicate his metaphors.
• Men Can't Keep Firm: Or even feed themselves, obviously.
• Melodrama: Funky Fries ... BUT AT WHAT Cost???
  • $3.99
• Mind Screw: I strip shows an alternate universe where beingness is impossible, populated by sentient beings composed of absolutely cypher.
• 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 fabricated up of ethnic minorities, Superman suspects it's not a coincidence.

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

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

• Mix-and-Match Homo: Subverted and discussed ^* (addressing some of the many reason it wouldn't piece of work on existent life) on this strip.
• Modernized God: Subverted when a woman is blest by a god there to grant all her desires... who assures her that she is now fertile and bodacious to bear male children, his idea of what women consider a approval non having kept up with the times.
• Modesty Bedsheet: Lampshaded in this comic. Click the big carmine 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 Practice It Better: How do you stop a werewolf from going on a rage-fueled killing spree whenever the moon is full? Psychopharmacology! ^notation 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 loftier-stakes game out of opening containers to check if they are full of former dairy.
• Mundane Utility: The all-time way for Superman to save the world is to convert his powers into inexpensive energy past spinning a big magnet around really fast... at least upward to a point.
• My Honey Smother: Public Health Advocates are this to anybody else. Fortunately they lack legislative power.
• My Brain Is Large: Horton, from the very kickoff comic. Sadly, two thirds of his brain was comprised of the little known "stupid lobe".

  Horton:"Two times Ii is 3."

• My God, What Have I Done?: Old Man Richards reacts this way when his try to prevent his neighborhood from existence gentrified backfires. He haunted the neighborhood because he wanted to lower the belongings value and scare rich people abroad then the poor renters could stay in that location, just instead he drove the holding value up because haunted homes are worth more.
• My New Gift Is Lame: If yous notice a Magic Lamp of Unadorned Forest, so a Calvinist Genie volition grant you Three Wishes! Actually, your grandchildren are the ones who volition receive those wishes. And that is only if y'all and they both work ceaselessly every twenty-four hour period of your lives. And if you lot live to see your grandchildren, y'all didn't work hard plenty. Also your actions accept no effect on whether or not God decides to permit y'all into Sky, just finding a Genie is probably a bad sign. And no wishing for annihilation fun!
• Nice Hat: Jokes with the Pope frequently revolve around his hat. This is a good example.
• Squeamish Job Breaking It, Hero:
• Nightmare Retardant: In-universe. The almost horrible monster of all time!
• No Hero to His Valet: One comic suggests that Don Quixote was a legitimately capable knight, only he was also a massive jerk to his scribe, so his scribe got the last express mirth by depicting the mighty knight every bit a unmeant fool.
• Noodle Implements:
• Nostalgia Filter: Addressed hither, here, and here.
  • Also parodied here.
• Not So In a higher place It All: Most of the time voties with Zack'southward wife in them accept her (and whatsoever 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 expiry because someone switched his flower with a knife and he never noticed the difference.
• Manifestly Evil: Inverted here and subverted hither.
• 1-Two Punchline: In that location's an entire bonus 2nd-punchline panel accessible by hovering over a cherry-red button at the end of the strip. Many of the main strips also take multiple punchlines, especially from the time before Zach started cartoon voteys. Lampshaded in this strip, which had 3 punchlines in the main strip, and then got a votey drawn years later saying nothing but "Do you really desire another punchline, yous greedy bastard?"
• I-Word Title: A few of the strips, along with being Recycled Titles:
  • Multiverse:
  • Words
  • Wisdom
• Only Six Faces: Though in this case, it doesn't really affair.
• Opposites Attract: Truthasaurus from "Uncomfortable Truthasaurus" explains you, kids, that this is a mutual misconception. Anybody wants someone hot and someone rich.
• Original Position Fallacy:
• Overly Long Gag: Tends to pop up (see Dream Within a Dream) and, when it does, the bonus console tends to show the artist looking at his now decrepit/withered/burnt manus after having drawn that many panels.
• Oxymoronic Existence: The sentient nothing that populates the Nothingverse.
• Painting the Medium: Correct hither, subverting your expectations once more.
• Pet the Dog: The Joker tries to do something skilful, just so Batman gets involved ...
• Picked Flowers Are Expressionless: This comic from explains the human ritual of flower-giving, as understood by aliens. Supposedly human males mutilate the hated institute-life to testify off their prowess... and it goes downhill from there.

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

• Pinkish Elephants: "If I drink less, I'll stop having bright hallucinations, Chuck."
• Poe'due south Law: Lampshaded in the votey for Bobby and the Gurg.

  Dear Voltaire's Ghost, delight allow everyone recognize this equally 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 i, where the victim turns it effectually on the caller.
• Precious Puppies: Using Heart equally an awesome ability.
• Prisoner's Dilemma: Discussed.
• 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 Significant: A "relationship tip" recommends clever comma placement to produce honest compliments. Lie: "You have a torso like Adonis." Truth: "You lot 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 nosotros'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" Spoken language:
  • Never inquire 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 depict 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 also. Yous could make your novel better by being someone else who would write a different novel. Also your beard sucks.

  • This homo can read his friend like an open book.
• Reckless Sidekick: Agreeing to be Batman'due south sidekick IS pretty reckless.
• Recurring Character: Several:
  • Batman (and some of his villains).
  • Superman.
  • The POTUS is near invariably a blackness, bearded, baldheaded, bespectacled human.
  • The Zorblaxian aliens.
  • God (drawn every bit a communion wafer, or perhaps because His form is incomprehensible to humans.)
  • Jesus.
  • Two young girls (one black with glasses, one white), typically with the one-time initiating a philosophical discussion.
• Recycled Title: Some strips share a name:
  • Multiverse:
  • Words
  • Wisdom
• Roaring Binge of Revenge: Gartok goes on one, hunting down and slaying the murderers of his wife and children. This this is framed every bit an aspiring author writing an evolutionary psychology epic, this revenge mainly serves to constitute "a credible threat of violence against future interference with his power to reproduce and childrear".
• Robosexual: This woman.

  Sally: What? Yous're the robot! Robots are incapable of love. It'south what makes sex with them cracking.

• Robot Buddy: This 1 is a Yandere.
• Rule of Cool: A number of punchlines revolve effectually the idea that, for engineers, Rule of Cool overrides all other considerations.
  • For scientists besides.
• Dominion 34: Hither.
• Running Gag:
  • Zach getting hate mail service.
  • 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 bodily strip its more fifty/50).
  • The votey on this comic, in the site comments. Mostly considering it was left up for weeks.
  • Graph jokes.
  • Absolutist dystopian what-if jokes usually involving mind command, hive-heed, sociological/socioeconomic experiments and alternative forms of sex. Zach is rather fond of destroying society.
  • Aliens (called Zorblaxians) looking down on human being society and customs.
    • The same aliens trying to brand kidnapped humans mate.
  • Infidelity.
  • 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 back up
  • Illustrating "difficult" things equally applied to everyday life. For example, regulatory capture.
  • Having fun when parenting (at the expense of the kids). Amongst others, at that place are two specific routines:
    • Kid asks something, parent explains, kid applies explanation (or other parent asks "what did you female parent/male parent teach you"); practical here to using punctuation to explain menstrual cycles.
    • Proficient parenting vs. effective parenting.
  • Harsh twist endings.
  • Pick-up-lines with science.
  • Playing non 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 "chore in finance".
  • In the voteys, unfavorably comparison himself to the xkcd guy.
    • Zach laughing at his own sometimes incredibly obscure/convoluted joke theme maxim "at that place's not plenty _____ jokes!" or "people/anybody beloved(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 ofttimes shows his wife glaring at him over his shoulder or making fun of him for the latest comic (particularly fell here). Afterwards his child was born, it became her holding their baby... who is also glaring at him. This continued as their family grew, and features 2 diapproving children.
    • "Old man Wienersmith shakes his pikestaff at yous" on comics that get preachy.
  • Economists are evil.
    • In the aforementioned 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.
• Safe Word: One strip teaches us that introducing safewords in nonsexual contexts is a fun fashion of creeping people out.
• The Scapegoat: An Imagine Spot from the President had the Economical Whipping Boy, who would be punished whenever bad economic news occurs, allowing the President to focus on issues he could really exert control over.

  President: What's this?! Lots of new jobs were created, but the unemployment charge per unit went up?! How does that even brand sense?!

• Screw Yourself: Here.
• Screw You, Elves!: In this comic, information technology 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 scientific discipline and technology, flying World to Zorblax Prime with behemothic rocket boosters, and blasting the Zorblaxian Homeworld to oblivion with a behemothic laser.
• Seen It All: This guy, where sex is concerned.
• Self-Defeating Prophecy: The man in Future 2 decides he does not take to strive for anything when his future cocky comes back with a fourth dimension car. This causes said future self to disappear.
• Self-Deprecation: Adequately common in the mouse-over bonus strips. Often this shows the artist's partner puncturing his pretensions or mocking him.

  Garfield: "I honey lasagna."

  Zach: "And then he fucking died!"

  • Taken Up to Eleven in this comic'southward votey.

  Zach, drawing Comics at iii AM: Aught I've e'er drawn is funny!

  • Whenever he has a guest creative person, 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 equally unattractive and having to worry about how any daughters they accept 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-instance, Zach has shown a definite trend toward making the idiot and/or asshole graphic symbol in any given strip a redhead like himself.
  • In this comic, the punchline is just someone telling a self-employed artist, who looks exactly similar Zach, that their comics suck, followed by a Beat Panel of Zach crying a single tear.
• Self-Inflicted Hell: The strip, pickup features a human who continually strikes out with women night later on night because he volition not end using the same cheesy pickup line that worked once. The woman who slept with him invoked information technology, knowing he would believe the line really worked.
• Self-Made Orphan: The Headless Horsemen here.
• Shooting Superman: A crook shoots Invincible Man. 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 academic concepts, ranging from philosophy of math to quantum computing.
• Shut Upwardly, Hannibal!: Superman is told something that requires a little introspection. And then naturally, he punches the dude in the face.
• Light-headed Reason for State of war: Two soldiers die in battle, and Saint Peter has to make up one's mind which ane was on the right side ...

  First Soldier: "Nosotros were fighting them considering their form of Economy is not as Marketplace-Oriented as ours, according to some metrics!"

  2d Soldier: "Nosotros were fighting them because the employ of their navy in relative proximity to our borders may take indicated that a larger ally of their was establishing a hegemony over our octant of the world!"

• Slippery Slope Fallacy: I comic has a girl ask her begetter if there is a puppy sky. Her father proceeds to point out that if he says yeah, it becomes impossible to decide what doesn't get a heaven, eventually suggesting that at that place is a meme heaven for ideas that dice. And so the male parent uses the fallacy over again to prove the verbal opposite thing - that since a meme heaven is ridiculous, so is a heaven for slightly more complex things, gradually getting to the indicate where in that location's no reason for a human heaven. That the line might exist drawn at humans, or even at biological life, never seems to occur to him.
• Pocket-sized Reference Pools: Invoked for politics and history here by showing how people's small reference pools for history affects political discourse.
• Smarter Than Yous 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 e'er gleaming his immense wisdom.
• Sophisticated every bit Hell: Here's one example.
  • And another.
• Infinite Whale Aesop: Math may seem too abstruse to be worth learning, but ignoring it will come dorsum 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 specially unfortunate one.
• Spurned into Suicide:
• Stating the Uncomplicated Solution: A medieval variation in this comic.
• Stealth Cigarette Commercial: Superman subtext with this
• Straw Feminist:
• Subverted Rhyme Every Occasion: Best shown here.

  I find a niggling rhyme can really have the edge off bad news. Which reminds me, I've been meaning to tell you... in that location once was a human being from schmonorrhea. Yous 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 non be what you think it is, and so turning out to exist what you thought it was after all.
    • Zig-Zagging Trope: Usually reserved for multi-panel, just information technology'due south been pulled off in i panel+ text as well.
• 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, like this comic, which likewise falls nether What an Idiot! and Tarot Motifs (if you expect closely).
• Super-Cute Superpowers: One comic has a little girl guarding Fort Knox who has the ability to brand puppies appear. Which she uses to deadly effect. Because she never specified where the puppies volition appear from. Such as from within the villain.
• Superior Species: The Zorblaxians in several strips, such equally one that reveals they have souls while humans don't.
• Surprisingly Realistic Upshot:
• Accept a 3rd Option: "I take a fantastic attorney."
• Take That!: Often accompanied past a "BAM!" in the Author'south Notes.
• Tampering with Food and Drink:
• Teens Are Brusk: This college freshman looks more like a high school freshman next to his dad.
• Teeny Weenie: Double Subverted. The man with the world's smallest penis gets plenty of girls because beingness a record-holder is impressive. Even so, the same tin 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, merely to see what he's do in response.
• That'south What She Said: While the consequences were great, it was worth information technology.
• Think of the Children!: Invoked by a Senator regarding gay matrimony, then twisted with Insane Troll Logic by the reporter ("Got it. So your code of ethics is to oppose things that are hard to explicate to kids"), with an appropriate headline and votey based on that logic.
• Time Travel for Fun and Turn a profit: The real reason why Scrooge was so generous at the terminate of A Christmas Carol.
• Too Impaired to Live: Too dumb to die.
  • In Hindsight, the gate seemed foreboding.
• Too Impaired to Fool: Almost verbatim.
• Besides Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: An Internet virgin has a soul that's "worse than the Necronomicon".
• Thanatos Gambit: Several examples of how to use this merely to mess around with people, such every bit hither. Or like this. Or this.
• There Can Exist Merely Ane: The Ultimate Diet. Information technology even says and then in the votey.
• This Isn't Sky:
• Unfortunate Names: Nobody will ever name anything discovered past Dr Oinky Hitlerballs after himself. He resigns from science. Attempt at invoking this with the Dickballs Theory to go along scientific discipline terms from existence appropriated past homeopathic remedies. It didn't piece of work.
• Unreliable Narrator: One comic posits that Don Quixote was a legitimate bad donkey who defeated the concluding of Spain's dragons, who was hiding in a windmill, but considering he was such a massive jerk to his chronicler Cervantes, Cervantes depicted the dauntless and powerful knight as a blundering idiot.
• Unsound Consequence: Lamp!
• Unwanted Spouse: "Countdown to Divorce: 25 months, 14 days, 3 hours, 27 minutes, 22 seconds.".
• Vengeance Feels Empty: Inverted. Non pursuing revenge feels maddening.
• Virgin Cede: Invoked then subverted here.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Zach's Writer Avatar in the bonus panels.
• Weapons-Grade Vocabulary: Subsequently failing to defeat humans, aliens finally resort to weapons grade information as last weapon confronting humans.
  • Homo 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, notwithstanding.
• Nosotros Come in Peace — Shoot to Kill discussed hither.
• Wedgie: The greatest of all fourth dimension.
• Weirdness Censor: Here.
• What Nosotros Now Know to Be True: A Mother's Love: Nature's Deadliest Poisonous substance
• When All You Have is a Hammer…:
  • Used discussion for give-and-take in one strip to explicate the lengths some men will become to for sexual gratification.
  • Goal: promote critical thinking and rational thought in children. Trouble: you're a candy visitor. Solution: label the smallest size of candy "fun size", instilling children with a good for you distrust of those in power.
• Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: Or "Asshole"?
• Who's on Get-go?: 57 panels worth of chemistry puns.
  • Horribly subverted hither.
• Windmill Crusader: Parodied in a comic where Don Quixote angers his biographer after killing a dragon within a windmill.
• Wishing for More Wishes:
• Women Are Wiser: Somewhat. They are slightly less neurotic almost their genitals at any charge per unit. And while in that location are plenty of comics making fun of collective male follies, there are none making fun of collective female follies - in fact, there is at to the lowest degree one comic making fun of the collective male folly of claiming that there is such a thing equally collective female person follies.
• Worm in an Apple: Isaac Newton got the idea for gravity later on stealing it from an apple tree worm (depicted as an earthworm with glasses, in a tree).
• Worth It: On the alt console of this comic, as well equally the alt console on this one.
• Would Hurt a Kid: God, evidently, according to this comic's votey.
• Incorrect Genre Savvy: Invoked as a manner of coping with simple bug.
• 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 paw clapping past, well, this trope.
• Zig-Zagging Trope: What is this, middle school?

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Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Webcomic/SaturdayMorningBreakfastCereal

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