20 funny comics to lighten your mood and make you laugh

11. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Similar to other webcomics, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is a series of irreverent short takes on daily topics. However, it also uses the lens of philosophy and psychology to gain a new view. Don’t worry, though. This isn’t going to be like that one person who got way too into their freshman philosophy course. Creator Zach Weinersmith is way funnier than that.

SMBC wasn’t always a series of one-offs, however. In its original form, SMBC was more of a character-driven project. It followed several college students through their lives and ran from January 2002 to September 2002. It’s still archived on the site and is now referred to as Classic SMBC.

The current version that has become wildly popular began September 2002 and has been running continuously since then. Now, it features both short takes and longer, more wordy ones. In one recent comic, a father responds to his child’s fear of monsters by going on a cosmological rant, thus infuriating the actual monster. In another, an angel is thoroughly skeptical about God’s idea to create animals.

SMBC’s thoughtful and academic focus has made it a favorite of many. In fact, SMBC has won the Web Cartoonists’ Choice Award for Outstanding Single Panel Comic twice (in 2006 and 2007). It’s even archived by the Library of Congress as part of its Webcomics Web Archive, which started collecting in 2014.

Weinersmith has also launched a side project to his popular webcomic, called SMBC Theater. Hosted on YouTube, these feature skits written by Weinersmith and featuring the same kind of strange humor central to the comics.