Why was the robot angry?
Why this joke works
Mechanical and Emotional Buttons
Robots have physical buttons, while “pressing someone’s buttons” means deliberately irritating them. The setup gives the machine a human emotion, preparing both meanings at once. Ask why the robot is angry as if diagnosing a malfunction. The answer works best with ordinary emphasis on “pressing,” not a robotic voice. The phrase applies naturally to a robot because machines may be operated through controls that someone physically presses.
A closer look
One small word makes the irritation repeat
“Kept” does useful work in the punchline. Pressing one control once could sound like normal operation; someone who kept doing it creates the repeated annoyance implied by the idiom. The pronoun “his” also treats the robot like a person before the answer arrives. Together, those choices make the emotion feel natural without adding a longer story or pretending the machine truly has feelings.
Fact behind the joke
Robot started as a theater word
The word “robot” first appeared in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R., short for Rossum’s Universal Robots. Those original robots were manufactured artificial workers, not the metal machines now commonly pictured. The term entered popular culture through storytelling before modern electronic robots existed, making the joke’s humanlike angry robot part of a much older tradition of imagining machines with human roles and reactions.