Comedy About Technology: How Comedians Satirise Tech

The best comedy about technology is never really about the gadget. It is about what the gadget reveals: our vanity, loneliness, gullibility and capacity to be sold anything with a sleek enough launch video. From Charlie Chaplin being force-fed by a machine to Bo Burnham reacting to a reaction video of himself, comedians have been the most reliable critics of each new technology, usually long before anyone else noticed the problem.

This page is about comedy that takes technology as its subject. For how technology changed the way comedy is delivered (records, radio, cable, YouTube), see our history of comedy and technology; for comedy made by machines, see AI and comedy.

Before computers: the machine as tormentor

Silent comedy was obsessed with machines because the audience was living through mechanisation. Buster Keaton's short The Electric House (1922) turns a fully automated home into a death trap. In Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), an efficiency expert tests a feeding machine on the Tramp, and it fails in every way a machine can fail, all of them directly into his face. The joke has never gone out of date: the device sold to save labour humiliates the person it was meant to serve.

Jacques Tati made a career of the same idea at a slower pace. In Mon Oncle (1958) his Monsieur Hulot wanders through a relative's ultra-modern house of hissing doors and decorative fountains, and in Playtime (1967) through a Paris of glass and identical office cubicles. Tati barely uses dialogue. The comedy is architectural: humans trying and failing to fit spaces designed for efficiency.

The office and the industry

Once computers moved into offices, the satire followed them. Mike Judge's film Office Space (1999) captured the despair of the late-1990s software job (the TPS reports, the cubicle, the printer that deserves to be destroyed in a field) so precisely that it became a cult film among the very programmers it depicted.

Judge came back to the subject from the other side with Silicon Valley (HBO, 2014-2019), created with John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky. Its start-up founders are not villains; they are anxious, awkward engineers who keep discovering that success means turning into the people they mocked. The show was famous for its accuracy, down to the jargon, the pitch-competition stagecraft and the tech campus's performative whimsy. Its best running joke is that every company claims it is "making the world a better place" while doing something absurdly small.

In Britain, The IT Crowd (Channel 4, 2006-2013) played the basement IT department as a traditional studio sitcom with a laugh track, and its "have you tried turning it off and on again?" became one of the decade's most quoted lines. Gaming studios got their own workplace comedy in Mythic Quest (Apple TV+), created by Rob McElhenney, Charlie Day and Megan Ganz.

Media people and the attention economy

Long before "influencer" was a job title, British satirists were mocking the people who would become influencers. Charlie Brooker began with a spoof listings website, TV Go Home, and developed one of its characters with Chris Morris into the sitcom Nathan Barley (Channel 4, 2005). Its hero is a London web-media type running a pointless website, speaking in slang that seems to update daily and treating every experience as content. In 2005 it looked like exaggeration. Within a decade it looked like a documentary.

Morris had already taken apart the grammar of news media in The Day Today and Brass Eye, satirising swooshing graphics and manufactured panic. Brooker went on to Black Mirror (2011 onward). It is mostly drama, but it is built by a comedy writer, and some of its best episodes are pitch-black social comedy. "Nosedive" (2016), written by Rashida Jones and Michael Schur from Brooker's story, imagines a world where everyone rates every interaction out of five stars. It plays like a sitcom whose laugh track has been replaced by dread.

Bo Burnham: the internet's native satirist

Bo Burnham is the rare comedian who grew up inside the technology he critiques. He became famous through YouTube videos recorded in his bedroom as a teenager, so when he satirises online culture, he does so as someone it made. His film Eighth Grade (2018) treats a 13-year-old's YouTube channel and Instagram feed with real tenderness, which is what makes it so uncomfortable.

Inside (Netflix, 2021) is his definitive statement. Shot alone in one room during the pandemic, it uses the visual vocabulary of online content (ring lights, projections, vlog confessionals) to satirise the internet while showing how deeply it has colonised his own head. "Welcome to the Internet" turns into a carnival-barker song about infinite availability; "White Woman's Instagram" parodies a feed's aesthetic before slipping into real grief. The most dizzying sequence has Burnham reacting to his own song, then reacting to the reaction, layer upon layer, until the joke is about the impossibility of ever stepping outside self-commentary. Our guide to Bo Burnham's career goes deeper.

Nathan Fielder and the simulated life

No contemporary comedian has more thoroughly explored what technology and media do to human behaviour than Nathan Fielder. Nathan for You (Comedy Central, 2013-2017) parodied business makeover shows by offering real small businesses absurd but technically logical strategies. The comedy came from the gap between business logic and human reality.

The Rehearsal (HBO, 2022 onward) pushes that into philosophy. Fielder builds full-scale replicas of real places and hires actors so that people can rehearse difficult moments of their lives, and in its second season (2025) he applies the method to aviation safety and communication between pilots. The show is not about any particular gadget; it is about the fantasy, central to the tech industry, that life can be simulated, optimised and debugged. It is also very, very funny about how that fantasy fails. Fielder also produced How To with John Wilson (HBO, 2020-2023), in which Wilson's hidden-camera footage of New York becomes a gentle essay about how people improvise lives around systems that make no sense.

Smaller weapons: pranks, parodies and spam

Some of the sharpest comedy about technology works at the scale of a single interaction:

James Veitch became internationally known for replying to email scammers with escalating, ridiculous enthusiasm and reading the exchanges aloud. His talk on the subject became a viral hit, and the material grew into live shows and a book, Dot Con. The joke is a reversal of power: the person the system is designed to exploit wastes the exploiter's time instead.
Tim and Eric built an aesthetic out of technological decay: glitchy public-access video, terrible infomercials and fake "Cinco" products that promise convenience while being plainly useless or harmful. Long before "cringe" was a genre, they understood that bad technology and bad advertising are inherently funny.
Adam Buxton's long-running live show BUG paired great music videos with dramatic readings of the YouTube comments beneath them, making internet culture's worst habits into a shared, affectionate joke.
Kyle Mooney, a Saturday Night Live alum from the Good Neighbor sketch group, has spent his career on found-footage nostalgia and awkward internet personas, and directed the millennium-bug comedy Y2K (2024).

The future, as a sitcom

A run of recent series imagine near-future technology through the shape of the sitcom. Greg Daniels's Upload (Prime Video) is a romantic comedy set in a commercial digital afterlife where your heaven has data caps. Mrs. Davis (Peacock, 2023) pits a nun against an all-powerful AI in a story too strange to summarise and more fun than it has any right to be. Russian Doll (Netflix) gives its looping heroine a job as a software engineer and treats her repeating death like a bug she has to debug. Each uses an old comic structure (the workplace, the romance, the time loop) to make new technology legible.

Artificial intelligence is now comedy's favourite target. Stand-ups mine chatbots for material about corporate politeness and confident wrongness, and the genre of human comedians pretending to be machines is more reliably funny than machines pretending to be comedians. We cover the real experiments and the labour fight in AI and comedy.

Why comedians see it first

There are good reasons comedians are often early critics of new technology.

They are early adopters by necessity. Comedians have used every new platform to find audiences, so they experience its effects up close, often before the general public.
Technology runs on promises. Product launches and pitch decks are performances of certainty, and comedy's oldest job is puncturing performed certainty.
The gap between design and use is funny. Every system assumes a rational user. Comedy is a catalogue of irrational ones.
Satire needs a shared reference. Phones, apps and feeds are among the few experiences almost everyone in an audience now shares, which makes them fertile ground for observation.

Frequently asked questions

What are the best comedies about technology?

Strong starting points are Silicon Valley (HBO), The IT Crowd, Nathan Barley, Bo Burnham's Inside, Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal, Mike Judge's film Office Space and the comic episodes of Black Mirror such as 'Nosedive'. Each takes a different angle, from industry satire to the loneliness of life online.

Is Black Mirror a comedy?

Mostly no, but it comes from comedy. Creator Charlie Brooker made his name as a satirical columnist and comedy writer, co-wrote the sitcom Nathan Barley with Chris Morris, and several Black Mirror episodes, including 'Nosedive', play as dark social comedy.

Who is the comedian that replies to spam emails?

That is James Veitch, a British comedian whose TED talk about stringing along an email scammer became one of the most-watched comedy talks online. He turned the material into live shows and a book, Dot Con.

What is Bo Burnham's Inside about?

Inside (2021) is a special Burnham made alone in one room during the pandemic. It uses the forms of internet content, from reaction videos to Instagram aesthetics, to satirise life online and to depict his own mental state.