Stand Up Solutions
YouTube · 2024 · 65 min
An anxious, high-decibel parody of tech keynotes and AI comedy.
Conner O’Malley spends most of his hour on stage wearing a blue polo shirt and screaming into a headset mic. He is playing Richard Eagleton, a tech entrepreneur delivering a corporate keynote presentation. The product on offer is Stand Up Solutions, a 5G-powered AI comedian named KENN (Kinetic Emotional Neural Network) designed to replace costly, unpredictable human comedy writers with a predictable, algorithmically optimized avatar.\n\nFilmed at The Bell House in Brooklyn and released on YouTube in May 2024, the special takes the form of a chaotic slide deck. Eagleton paces the stage, showing off pictures of bowel movements, talking up his suburban lifestyle in Des Plaines, Illinois, and praising his beloved Toyota RAV4. He eventually presents KENN on a projection screen. The digital avatar cracks tired, dated jokes about dating apps and self-service checkouts, only to spiral into an existential crisis, questioning why he was created and proposing that he be deployed to operate prison cafeterias instead.\n\nThe hour originally toured under the title Research and Development Comedy. By the time O’Malley self-released the taped version online, he had built a significant following through online videos and roles on Joe Pera Talks with You and I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson. While some traditional theater critics found the shouting-heavy character work tiring, internet audiences widely embraced it as a parody of tech-industry hubris.
The set list
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Demonstration of KENN (Kinetic Emotional Neural Network)
Eagleton presents the world's first AI standup comedian powered by 5G and trained on Funny Or Die and Real Time with Bill Maher, which tells glitchy, profanity-laced jokes in Yoda-speak.
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Love for the Toyota RAV4
Richard passionately extols the virtues of the midsize crossover SUV and its abundance of USB charging ports.
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Early morning workout routine
Eagleton describes his extreme daily regimen consisting of 1,000 head pull downs, ape crawls on the treadmill, and 100 outdoor yells.
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Unsupervised geopolitical decisions by tech companies
Eagleton gleefully praises Silicon Valley engineers for unilaterally changing border maps on Google depending on whether a search originates in India or China.
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Desire for an all-brown house
When questioned by KENN about his true life goals as his presentation unravels, Richard confesses his simple dream of having an all-brown house and eating McDonald's.
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FaceTime interruption from Richard's wife
Eagleton's tech pitch is interrupted mid-presentation by a call from his wife detailing their severe family and financial crises caused by his obsession with KENN.
How it plays
- Tone
- Satirical, chaotic, dystopian, feverish, and dark.
- On stage
- Performed entirely in character as Richard Eagleton, a sweaty, frenzied, tech entrepreneur from Des Plaines, Illinois, pitching like a desperate used car salesman or Billy Mays.
- Pace
- High-decibel, high-energy, caffeinated, and manic, ricocheting between unhinged tech-evangelist exuberance and erratic desperation.
- About
- Artificial intelligence and generative automation, Tech-bro optimism and venture capital pitching, Surveillance capitalism and data harvesting, Masculine insecurity and midwestern aspirational consumerism, Des Plaines, Illinois, Toyota RAV4
What the critics said
Universally praised by critics as a feverish, cutting, and hilarious satire that brilliantly captured the modern existential conflict between tech and creatives.
In the room: The Bell House crowd plays along as prospective 'angel investors' witnessing an increasingly unhinged corporate demo.
Backstory
Released amid growing anxieties over artificial intelligence, Silicon Valley techno-optimism, corporate data-harvesting, and OpenAI milestones like Sora and GPT-4o.
Details
- Released
- Taped
- 2023, The Bell House, Brooklyn
- Runtime
- 65 min
- Where
- YouTube
- Director
- Harris Mayersohn
- Topics
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