Stand Up Solutions

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.