Nikita Oster stood onstage wearing a ridiculous exoskeleton created by an audience member, designed to relieve physical stress for people undergoing manual labor daily. With his elbows hoisted near his ears, hands dangling stiffly, the contraption left Oster looking not unlike a futuristic human scarecrow, inducing chuckles from the crowd.
“I’ve never felt less empowered in my life,” he deadpanned to the audience, kicking off an evening full of sharp, witty digs at Silicon Valley tech culture.
That opening was part of a tech roast show by Socially Inept, a comedy trio of former tech workers—Austin Nasso, Nikita Oster, and Jesse Warren—now touring the U.S. to poke fun at startups, founders, and tech moguls. On Jan. 17, they brought their humor to the San Jose Civic for a night of jokes, roasts, and savage banter.
The format was interactive from the start. In one of the show’s best segments, the comedy trio solicited audience members’ own LinkedIn pages and startup ideas to be reviewed onstage.
When the trio spoke to one founder in the audience claiming to “shape human civilization” with AI, they refused to let up from turning him over the fire, even though the founder was quite obviously less receptive to such jokes. Although the group got in a few good jabs as they perused the website (“Did you take acid once and make a website?” one quipped), the jokes, unfortunately, fell flat without reciprocation.
The funniest moments came when audience members leaned into the roast. RapidFlare, a company bringing AI-assistants to business websites, went so far as to bring its whole team to the show as a team-bonding exercise. While testing out their chatbots, ads for a sketchy spa kept appearing—“Is your entire company just a PDF of a random spa?” Nasso asked. The CEO laughed and passed the blame to the CTO, who passed it right down the line to the engineers.
It’s this kind of playful humor that thrived during the show, where the tech world is more than ripe for roasting. In Silicon Valley, where everyone is touched by technology in some shape or form, Socially Inept isn’t afraid to call out the “founders” of the newest buzzword startups, serving up humor that the local tech crowd can especially appreciate. Catch their next shows in San Francisco on March 12 and 13.
