A Mehta employee finds herself in a difficult position: she is left alone in a crowd of 700 people as three men in black grill her about her work, while another holds a camera in her face and projects her image onto a large screen above the stage.
“What do you do at Meta?” they ask.
“Integrity,” she replied.
The crowd cheers.
“They're sarcastically cheering you on, by the way,” one of the men says, “because they find your existence amusing.”
A second man chimes in. “How does it feel to have your entire department become a punch line?”
This exchange would be incredibly rude in almost any context, but these kinds of comments are commonplace on “Socially Impossible,” a comedy show hosted by former tech workers who mock their audience, most of whom are tech workers themselves.
A few months ago, I was introduced to Socially Inept at a “speed dating” event, where we hit it off over our shared love of early stage AI founders and comedy. “You have to see these guys,” the founders told me. Their performance consists entirely of trashing tech volunteers selected from the audience. They expose the founders in real time and make fun of them on stage.
The concept was intriguing. Not only was it highly entertaining, but vetting founders seemed like a great form of due diligence. Can you pitch under pressure? Can you captivate an audience? Does your company survive a quick Google search?
Luckily, Socially Implicit was coming to New York for two nights in late April, so I bought tickets and ended up seeing the show at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre on the Upper West Side. The choice of venue was an interesting one: When we think of New York's tech hotspots, we think of the Flatiron District, home to venture capital firms like Union Square Ventures and Thrive Capital, and the downtown neighborhood of Hudson Square on Manhattan's west side, where Google recently opened its $2.1 billion headquarters.
But the Uptown venue didn't seem to scare off techies, and both the Friday and Saturday night shows were sold out. Arriving at the venue, I felt like I'd been transported to happy hour at a San Francisco-based tech conference, and I weaved my way through the bustling crowd, most of whom were in their early to mid-20s, wearing a uniform of t-shirts, jeans, sneakers, and glasses. As I took my seat, people around me sipped Liquid Death Water, popped canned cocktails, and gossiped about which of my friends were quitting their jobs at big tech companies to become startup founders.
While I waited for the show to start, I only learned the basics. Socially Inept was founded by former big tech employees Jesse Warren and Austin Nasso. Along with co-host Nikita Oster, they host shows in tech hotspots around the country, including New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, and Boston, satirizing the tech industry and mocking the engineers, founders, VCs, and interns in their audience.
Nasso, Oster and Warren met through Seattle's comedy scene while Nasso and Warren were both working for major tech companies in the city. Marcia Oster/@capturedsea
The three met in 2018 while they were all living in Seattle. Though Warren and Nasso both came from big tech companies (Warren interned at Microsoft and SpaceX and worked at an AI startup, while Nasso was a software engineer at Microsoft), the three ended up meeting on the Seattle comedy circuit, performing stand-up in bars and clubs. At the time, Seattle comedy was going through a “roast” period, with many shows and open mics focused on making fun of specific figures—think Comedy Central's legendary roasts of Justin Bieber, James Franco, and more recently Tom Brady.
Similarly, the first hour of Socially Inept was spent on seemingly random attacks on the audience, with Warren, Nassau and Oster taking to the stage dressed all in black while crew members toyed with the crowd with video cameras and microphones, searching for the three's next victims.
As an audience member, you need to have some tech knowledge to fully enjoy the show. The jokes are mostly improvised reactions to tech stereotypes. Often it's the person's job, resume, or startup idea that's the laughing stock in the first place, and the host's response is merely an afterthought.
At a recent show in Los Angeles, the trio highlighted the founders of a startup building a VR concert experience.
“Oh, this is so ridiculous,” Warren said as a staff member put up the company's website on a big screen onstage for the audience to tease. “You have to see how ridiculous this is.”
At another show, the host invited onstage a former Silicon Valley bank employee who now works at Microsoft developing mixed-reality headsets for the Army.
“Imagine having a Windows gun,” Nasso said, amid laughter from the audience. “How bad would that be?”
Although the rapid-fire roast format was incredibly entertaining, I was anxious and sick throughout the 90-minute show, fearing the humiliation of being singled out as a tech journalist. However, many in the room seemed to welcome the chance to be mocked, and volunteered to participate.
At one point in my show, an enthusiastic college student raised his hand, and as the microphone and camera were turned toward them, they announced that they had just landed a summer internship at eBay, eliciting laughs and cheers from the audience.
Reaction from the stage: “Is eBay even a technology company?”
As they make fun of tech gurus on the spot, Socially Impept has found a formula that blends crowd movement and audience participation with improvisation. The trio also has a knack for focusing their jokes on the humor of the situation itself, rather than making you feel really awful about what someone did or who they are, so you feel like you're in the joke even when you're the butt of it.
The trio also actively solicits feedback through forms emailed to attendees, and takes the advice to heart to ensure their comedy doesn't come off as mean-spirited.
“Performing in public can be hard to navigate because it comes with the potential to offend people or to hurt people with what you say even if you have the right to say it,” Oster said. “After every show, we reflect together and discuss what went well and what might have been uncomfortable.”
Of course, it helps that Socially Inept is primarily taking a shot at poking fun at a popular industry known for its high salaries and generous benefits. And for the most part, the tech workers in the audience were very self-aware and seemed okay with being mocked. In an industry that is sometimes driven by public image, big compensation packages, impressive resumes, and thought leadership, it was refreshing to see tech people eager to poke fun at themselves and, in some cases, actively seek out opportunities to humble themselves.
“The tech industry is really wild and there are so many different subcultures out there,” Nasso said.
“And it's always changing, right?” Warren added. “They do one thing one year and then the next year they move on to something else. So we can talk about it and it's always fresh.”
