“Let me get this straight,” John Mulaney said. “You’re hosting a ‘future of AI’ event in a city that has failed humanity so miserably?”
Everyone inside the auditorium at the Moscone Center groaned. Any notion that the award-winning comedian would play the corporate gig safe (and clean) were thrown out the window Thursday, when Mulaney, closing the Dreamforce festivities, started roasting his host, Salesforce, and the audience sitting right in front of him.
“You look like a group who looked at the self-checkout counters at CVS and thought, ‘This is the future,’” Mulaney said.
“If AI is truly smarter than us and tells us that [humans] should die, then I think we should die,” he said, looking out to the crowd from center stage. “So many of you feel imminently replaceable.”
He added, “Can AI sit there in a fleece vest? Can AI not go to events and spend all day at a bar?”
In a wide-ranging, 45-minute set, Mulaney did not hold back when it came to joking about the cartoonish conference, which aspired to be the “largest AI event in the world.”
“You’re an account executive at Top Low?” Mulaney asked an audience member, who clarified that she works at Tableau, a data visualization company. “You know in your goddamn bones that a bunch of you are working on products that are just OK, but you have to vamp and make up terms to make it sound more awesome than it is.”
“You’re a VP of customer success?” he asked another attendee. “Congratulations on your position that did not exist five years ago!”
Between anecdotes about his aging parents, his stint in rehab, and fatherhood, Mulaney worked the crowd, poking fun at tech workers and their buzzwords.
“What’s important here is that we’re looking for solutions,” he said sarcastically. “And in looking for solutions, what we’re really after is insights, which then lead to success. Now, start prepping the humans for robots.
“Some of the vaguest language ever devised has been used here in the last three days,” he continued. “The fact that there are 45,000 ‘trailblazers’ here couldn’t devalue the title any more.”
Since 2020, Mulaney has married actress Olivia Munn, had a son, and released a Netflix special called “Baby J,” detailing his struggles with drug addiction, and a limited series, “Everybody’s in LA.”
In addition to the Dreamforce set, Mulaney is headlining a show Thursday evening at the Golden Gate Theatre.
The comedian rounded out his Dreamforce appearance by thanking attendees “for the world you’re creating for my son … where he will never talk to an actual human again. Instead, a little cartoon Einstein will pop up and give him a sort of good answer and probably refer him to another chatbot.”
Mulaney then shared an anecdote about how he and his son, who is nearly 3, like to play baseball in their front yard.
“We’re just two guys hitting Wiffle balls badly and yelling ‘Good job’ at each other,” he said. “It’s sort of the same energy here at Dreamforce.”