Comedian John Mulaney was hired to perform standup at a tech event in San Francisco last week that the event’s organizers would likely rather soon forget. However, his audience-jabbing jokes have subsequently made their way to the internet, where fans are rallying around Mulney’s brashness.
According to The San Francisco Standard , Mulaney had been performing a 45-minute set at the Salesforce 2024 Dreamforce AI conference. But in between jokes about fatherhood, his parents, and stint in rehab a few years back, the 42-year-old worked the audience and roasted attendees.
“Let me get this straight. You’re hosting a ‘future of AI’ event in a city that has failed humanity so miserably?” Mulaney said early into his set, amid apparent “groaning” from the crowd.
“You look like a group who looked at the self-checkout counters at CVS and thought, ‘This is the future,’” he continued. “If AI is truly smarter than us and tells us that [humans] should die, then I think we should die. So many of you feel imminently replaceable.”
In another couple of jabs, the Big Mouth star asked “Can AI sit there in a fleece vest?” and “Can AI not go to events and spend all day at a bar?”
Mulaney also took the conference attendees to task for their over-inflated job titles and sense of purpose.
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“You know in your goddamn bones that a bunch of you are working on products that are just OK, but you have to vamp and make up terms to make it sound more awesome than it is,” he said to an employee of the data visualization company Tableau. When another attendee mentioned that their title was “VP of customer success,” he fired back: “Congratulations on your position that did not exist five years ago!”
“Some of the vaguest language ever devised has been used here in the last three days,” Mulaney continued. “The fact that there are 45,000 ‘trailblazers’ here couldn’t devalue the title any more.”
Near the end of his performance, Mulnaey thanked the room for “the world you’re creating for my son … where he will never talk to an actual human again. Instead, a little cartoon Einstein will pop up and give him a sort of good answer and probably refer him to another chatbot.”
“We’re just two guys hitting Wiffle balls badly and yelling ‘Good job’ at each other,” he noted of his three-year-old son Malcolm, savagely adding. “It’s sort of the same energy here at Dreamforce.”
By Sunday, snippets of the article had made their way to social media, where people couldn’t get enough of the backfired stand up set.
“We should bully tech nerds much more often. They should get cop treatment at this point,” wrote one user, while another called it “one of the funniest things I’ve ever read,” among other observations.
In addition to the corporate gig, Mulaney will also be headlining a show at the San Francisco's Golden Gate Theatre on Thursday evening. Whether or not those attendees will be safe from his barbs remains to be seen.
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