Comedian John Mulaney was hired to do stand-up at a tech event in San Francisco last week, and the event’s organizers will likely soon forget about it. But his tongue-in-cheek jokes later made their way online, where fans rallied around Mulney’s chutzpah.
Accordingly San Francisco StandardMulaney gave a 45-minute performance at the Salesforce 2024 Dreamforce AI conference, but between jokes about fatherhood, his parents, and his rehab stint a few years ago, the 42-year-old actor worked the audience and angered attendees.
“Let me get this straight. You're throwing a 'future of AI' event in a city that has failed humanity so terribly?” Mulaney said early in his set, to noticeable “groans” from the crowd.
“You look at the self-checkout counters at CVS and you think, ‘This is the future,’” he continued. “If AI is truly smarter than us and can [humans] “If he must die, then I think we should die too. Many of you feel that you can be replaced immediately.”
A few more blows, Big mouth Yıldız asked, “Can AI sit there wearing a polar vest?” and “Can't AI go to events and spend all day at the bar?”
Mulaney also criticized conference attendees for their inflated job titles and sense of purpose.
“You know deep in your bones that you’re a group of people working on products that are just okay, but you have to make up terms and express yourself to make it seem more awesome than it is,” he told an employee at the data visualization company Tableau. When another respondent said her title was “VP of customer success,” she replied, “Congratulations on a position that didn’t exist five years ago!”
“The most obscure language ever invented has been used here over the last three days,” Mulaney continued. “The fact that there are 45,000 ‘pioneers’ here could not diminish the value of the title any further.”
Towards the end of his performance, Mulnaey thanked the room for “the world you created for my son… a world where he will never talk to a real person again. Instead, a little cartoon Einstein will come out and give him a good answer and probably refer him to another chatbot.”
“We're just two guys hitting Wiffle balls hard and yelling 'Good job' at each other,” he remarked of his three-year-old son Malcolm, adding savagely, “Dreamforce has the same energy.”
By Sunday, parts of the article had made their way onto social media, and people couldn't get enough of the backlash-turned stand-up special.
“We need to bully tech geeks much more often. They should be treated like the police at this point,” one user wrote, while another called this “one of the funniest things I've ever read,” among other observations.
In addition to the corporate show, Mulaney is also hosting a show at the Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco on Thursday night, and it remains to be seen whether those attendees will be safe from his vitriolic comments.