50 Smart TV Jokes for People Just Trying to Watch Something

I own four remotes. One turns the TV on, one turns it off, one does volume, and one is for the soundbar that turns itself on whenever it feels like it.

I bought a universal remote. It learned three of my devices and decided the fourth was beneath it.

My six-year-old can find any show in four taps. I have a CS degree and I need fourteen.

The TV plays a six-second logo animation on boot. It is the longest six seconds in my home.

My TV takes ninety seconds to boot. My laptop takes nine. I do not know which one is the computer anymore.

The TV asked to install a firmware update at 9 p.m. on a Friday. It knew.

The firmware update said it would take two minutes. Nineteen minutes later it was at 40 percent and I was googling whether my warranty covered yelling.

After the firmware update the speakers stopped working. The TV called this an improvement.

I turned on my TV and the home screen showed me an ad for a different TV.

I opened the settings menu and there was an ad above the settings menu. The settings to disable that ad were behind the ad.

My TV warned me I had used seven percent of its storage. I have never installed anything on my TV. The storage is the ads.

The TV has an app store. The app store has six apps. Two are broken and one is just an ad.

I had to enter my Netflix password on a directional pad. By the letter G I had forgotten my own name.

I reset my Netflix password because typing the old one on the remote was harder than just admitting defeat.

Disney+ showed me a QR code to log in on my phone. It was the only kind thing a smart TV has ever done for me.

I tried to watch YouTube on YouTube TV. I tried to watch YouTube TV on YouTube. Neither worked and one billed me.

I switched from HDMI 1 to HDMI 2 and aged four months waiting for the handshake to complete.

HDMI-CEC turned the TV on because the soundbar woke up to check the weather. We were asleep.

The soundbar pairs over Bluetooth and unpairs every seven days like a cat that has decided we are not family.

My bluetooth headphones have just enough latency that everyone on screen sounds like a poorly dubbed monster movie.

Lip-sync drifted four frames during the season finale. The villain confessed, then his mouth did.

The home screen autoplays a trailer the second it loads. With sound. At the volume of the last thing I watched, which was a fireworks show.

An autoplay trailer spoiled the show I was about to start. The TV opened with the ending.

Continue Watching is showing me a movie I finished in 2022. It is grieving on my behalf.

The kids profile leaked into the adult home screen and now Bluey is sitting next to a true-crime thumbnail.

Are you still watching, asked the TV, in the middle of a sentence, during a movie I started forty minutes ago.

Are you still watching, asked the TV, eight episodes deep into a season I had not paused once.

The recommendation engine suggested the exact show I had just finished. It thinks I am a goldfish.

The 4K plan and the HD plan cost different amounts. The TV is 4K. The plan is HD. The Wi-Fi is a rumor.

This title is not available in 4K, said the streaming app, on the show I subscribed to the 4K tier for.

Your internet is slow, said the overlay, on an internet plan that costs more than the show.

The stream buffered in the last thirty seconds of the climax. I now own the ending in two halves.

The captions were burned in three seconds early. I learned the punchline before the joke.

The captions defaulted to a language I do not speak. I watched twelve minutes before realizing the show was not surrealist.

The captions toggle does not toggle the captions. It toggles whether the toggle works.

Picture modes: Vivid, Sport, Cinema, Game, and Default which is somehow none of those.

Motion smoothing made the cinematic period drama look like a soap opera filmed in my kitchen.

Ambient mode displays artwork between sessions. The artwork is an ad for a phone.

The screensaver shows beautiful places around the world, then advertises its way back to a home screen that wants to sell me a different TV.

My smart home turned off the living room lights during the murder scene, on schedule, and now I cannot find the remote or the dog.

I set up parental controls and then forgot the PIN. My kid has now seen more than I have.

I remembered the parental controls the moment after my kid found a horror short on the recommendations row.

I rebooted the TV because the app froze. The reboot took eight minutes. The app was fine in seven.

The TV connected to Wi-Fi by remembering a password I changed two routers ago and being smug about it.

There is an entire row on the home screen titled Sponsored. The whole row.

I pressed Home and it took me somewhere that was not home.

I pressed Back and it exited the app, closed the streaming service, returned to live TV, and tuned to an infomercial.

The remote has a button labeled Smart. It opens a menu of things I did not ask for, sponsored by people I did not invite.

The remote has a microphone. I said play the show. It opened the weather, the app store, and a banner for cruises.

The voice remote heard a sneeze and queued an album of sneezing podcasts.

I just wanted to watch something. The TV wanted a relationship.