John Mulaney Roasts Tech Geeks Who Hired Him to Speak at Conference

Are the tech geeks at Salesforce secretly comedy masochists? 

Last year, they invited Seth Meyers to drop by and rip them a new one. (Even after doing a bunch of research to prepare for the 2023 corporate gig, Meyers confessed he still had “no fucking idea” what Salesforce did.) Those insults felt so good that this year, Salesforce got out the checkbook and paid John Mulaney to inflict another round of Animal House-style punishment.

Mulaney closed the company’s Dreamforce event (it deserves a good roasting for that aspirational-vomit name alone) with a series of burns that likely left serious scorch marks on attendees, according to The San Francisco Standard. It didn’t hurt that the event billed itself as “the largest A.I. event in the world,” giving Mulaney an easy target. Here are some of the comic’s meanest jokes at the expense of the people who were paying him:

• “If A.I. is truly smarter than us and tells us that we should die, then I think we should die. So many of you feel imminently replaceable.”
• “You look like a group who looked at the self-checkout counters at CVS and thought, ‘This is the future.’”
• “You know in your goddamn bones that a bunch of you are working on products that are just okay, 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? Congratulations on your position that did not exist five years ago!”
• “Some of the vaguest language ever devised has been used here in the last three days. The fact that there are 45,000 ‘trailblazers’ here couldn’t devalue the title any more.”

Mulaney ended the set by talking about his nearly three-year-old son, Malcolm. He applauded 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.”

The event, Mulaney said, reminded him of the ball games that he and Malcolm enjoy in their yard. “We’re just two guys hitting Whiffle balls badly and yelling ‘Good job’ at each other. It’s sort of the same energy here at Dreamforce.”