Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A person is showing someone videos on a device. The first is "a video of a naked woman dancing." The second is "a video of your grandma then masticating a piece of chewing tobacco." Then there is a video of "the naked lady again." The viewer becomes increasingly disturbed -- not by the content itself, but by the existential anxiety of having access to all this information. They say: "I don't know why but I'm worried by the combination. That was not one of my normal anxieties." The other person notes that "people are simple machines who aren't meant to be able to access unlimited information."

The final panel shows silhouetted figures with one saying "I'm going to try turning you off then turning you on," treating the anxious human like a malfunctioning computer that needs a reboot.

The Humor

The comedy comes from the absurd juxtaposition of the random, unfiltered content that modern technology puts at our fingertips and the psychological toll it takes. The joke captures the uniquely 21st-century feeling of scrolling through wildly disparate content in rapid succession -- something titillating, something grotesque, something personal -- and feeling a vague, unnameable dread as a result. The "turning you off and on" punchline extends the metaphor of humans as "simple machines" to its logical conclusion, treating existential media-overload anxiety as a technical glitch that can be solved with a reboot.

References

The title "boot" refers to the computing term for starting up (or restarting) a machine, tying into the final panel's joke about turning a person off and on again as a troubleshooting measure.