Tech worker Jash Bangdiwala took a seat on a stool in front of a room full of people and proceeded to have everything from his dating life to his job openly mocked.
“Jash worked for Microsoft,” said Adi Naidu, a comedian and himself an engineer at Amazon. “Your parents must be really proud of you … 20 years ago.”
Such was the scene on Thursday night at Laughs Comedy Club in Seattle as stand-up comedians took their best shots at tech and techies in another edition of the “Socially Inept: Tech Comedy Roast.” The venue was packed with young tech workers from a range of companies who clearly got a kick out of hearing their peers and their industry get made fun of.
Jokes were lobbed at a host of entities, including Microsoft, Bing, Amazon, Uber, online dating, apps and more. Sex, drugs, ethnic and racial comedy were featured heavily throughout the hour-and-a-half event, which started with four stand-up sets and progressed to the roasting of three “volunteer” audience members.
The show was produced in part by Jesse Warren, a former University of Washington computer science major and Microsoft and SpaceX worker who quit to pursue comedy full time. He had help from comedians Naidu, Erin Ingle, Taylor Clark and Naveed Mahbub.
“Every tech person has a secret desire to do comedy,” Warren said. “It’s this thing you’ll start to realize over and over, because smart people like comedy.”
Here’s a sampling of some of the best lines (which we can actually print here) focusing on tech, and images from the night:
- “Neither of my parents wanted me to be a doctor or an engineer. In fact, my dad wanted me to be a stand-up comedian, because he was a stand-up comedian. And my mom, she wanted me to anything but a stand-up comedian. She wanted me to be a tattoo artist. Can you imagine? Both my parents wished for me to be poor … and white!” — Adi
- “Eighty years of freedom and India is still a developing country. I guess that’s because all of the developers are here!” — Adi
- “Jash works on integrating Bing into Windows. Just goes to show you guys that not all heroes wear capes. Remember that time you fired up Windows and thought, ‘Yeah this is great and all, but it could use some more Bing.'” — Jesse roasting Jash
- “Cool that you worked at Bing, which we all know is Google for virgins.” — Erin roasting Jash
- “Carlos ghosts his dates regularly. And that is the only qualification he possesses as a tech recruiter.” — Adi roasting Carlos
- “Very charming guy. Very attractive guy. You do kind of look like a low-rent Russell Wilson, but, nobody cares if you stay in Seattle.” — Erin roasting Carlos.
- “I feel like you got a job at Uber because you were too slimy for pharmaceuticals.” — Erin roasting Carlos
- “Vineeth is an incoming penetration testing intern at Nordstrom. Don’t even have to write a roast joke. It’s a real thing.” — Jesse roasting Vineeth
- “Super cool to have you here. You look like Jash before Xbox.” — Erin roasting Vineeth
- “For people who don’t know what Informatics is, it’s a technical term that means ‘rejected from the computer science department.'” — Jesse roasting Vineeth over his University of Washington major.
