real engineering

An Onion News Network parody of a 'hyper-realistic' modern warfare game whose gameplay consists of paperwork, waiting for orders and repairing trucks.

A clip from the 1985 comedy Real Genius in which a laser ignites a giant container of popcorn inside a house.

A one-minute clip of Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents' Dinner delivering the line that reality has a well-known liberal bias.

A 2009 satirical news segment from The Onion's 'In The Know' in which pundits adjust their on-air opinions in real time according to a live viewer poll. It lampoons pandering media and politics.

The earliest filmed version of the Turbo Encabulator technical-jargon parody, shot in the late 1970s with narrator Bud Haggert. It deadpans a stream of meaningless engineering language.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment claiming that jaywalking became a crime through campaigns by the auto industry. It is a short, comedic history of how streets were reclaimed for cars.

A spoof industrial promo for the Rockwell Retro Encabulator, a deadpan stream of technobabble about an imaginary machine. It is a classic engineering in-joke.

An Adam Ruins Everything comedy segment on why US hospitals are so expensive, covering opaque price lists, surprise bills and penalties for the uninsured.

A comedy video in which a salesperson demands that a web developer fix a down website, with the two talking past each other. It won a Webby award.

A short Tim and Eric Awesome Show sketch, The Universe I, II & III, in which the cosmos is shown in a deliberately absurd way. It is an Adult Swim surreal comedy bit.

A viral amateur video in which a woman struggles to explain what miles per hour means. It is a comedic clip of someone failing to reason about speed.

Too Many Cooks is an Adult Swim absurdist parody of sitcom opening credits that spirals into a surreal horror comedy. It runs about eleven minutes.

Celery Man is a short Tim and Eric sketch in which Paul Rudd uses an absurd computer interface. It is a surreal comedy bit from their show.

A short comedy video of the Turbo Encabulator, a piece of technobabble nonsense describing an imaginary machine in deadpan engineering language.

A Community clip in which Dean Pelton explores a virtual reality environment, including a blooper moment.

A George Carlin stand-up routine arguing that rights are really temporary privileges that can be taken away. The uploader frames it with conspiracy-leaning tags.

A short satirical video, originally titled Broccoli Man, in which an engineer who only wants to serve 5 terabytes gets tangled in Google's internal resource and production processes. It is the source of the phrase about forgetting how to count that low.

A one-minute clip of Scotty from Star Trek giving advice to engineers about managing expectations in estimates. It is a comedic bit of workplace wisdom.

A comedy sketch of a business meeting in which an engineer, the expert, is asked to do impossible things like draw red lines with blue ink.

A 2012 parody dub that splices clips of Barack Obama speaking into a performance of Carly Rae Jepsen's 'Call Me Maybe'. It is a short comedic mashup built entirely from re-ordered snippets of his real speech.

A short KRAZAM comedy sketch in which engineers explain an absurdly tangled microservices architecture to a manager. It parodies how backend complexity gets justified with jargon.

George Carlin's classic stand-up routine about 'stuff' and how much of life is spent accumulating and storing it, from Comic Relief 1986. It satirizes American consumerism and possessions.

Finnish YouTuber Saara improvises gibberish that mimics how various languages sound to people who do not speak them. The sentences are mostly made up, and the clip went viral.

A short satirical 'motivational' talk by the character Self-help Singh, a sham life coach who urges viewers to do nothing. It parodies self-help gurus and hustle culture.

A New York Times Op-Docs short in which actors perform a real legal deposition transcript. A lawyer gets tangled in an absurd argument with a county employee about what counts as a photocopier, in a dispute over fees for public records.

The pilot of the British comedy series Look Around You, a deadpan parody of 1970s and 80s school science programmes, in which the scientists examine calcium.

A five-minute CBC Radio WireTap farewell video in which people of all ages offer words of wisdom to younger people. The advice is short and funny, and keeps coming back to the point that nobody really knows what they are doing.

A short Ze Frank piece from his 2006 show about "brain crack", the rush of exciting new ideas that feel great but tend to fall apart once you start executing them.

Part one of Sergey Kuryokhin's 1991 live Soviet TV hoax in which he claimed that Lenin was a mushroom. With subtitles, it shows how a surreal absurd theory can be made to seem proven on live television.

Dylan Beattie's parody of 'We Didn't Start the Fire' with lyrics made entirely of real software framework names, ending in the chorus about building yet another framework.

Tom Scott's three-minute satirical short about a corporate-run, DRM-and-ads-laden afterlife after mind uploading. It imagines copyright law and lawyers applied to human memory and consciousness.

CNN's clip of Stephen Colbert's 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner routine, in which he mocks President Bush and the press in character. It was republished on the tenth anniversary.

A Mitchell and Webb sketch in which two German soldiers realize their uniforms carry skulls and wonder whether they are the baddies. It is a short comedy bit about people failing to see themselves as the villains.

A one-minute clip from a CSI episode featuring the trope of zooming and enhancing low-resolution images. The uploader says it was the last CSI episode they watched.

An Adult Swim infomercial parody for Smart Pipe, a fictional startup that turns toilet waste into data and social connectivity. It satirizes everything-connected tech culture.

A short Simpsons clip from Who Shot Mr. Burns Part 1 in which Mr. Burns declares the sun his enemy and plans to block it out.

A two-minute supercut of film and TV characters ordering a computer to 'enhance' a blurry image into a perfectly sharp one. It is a remaster of an earlier 2009 version.

An SNL sketch in which Adam Sandler plays a tour operator who bluntly clarifies what his Italy tours can and cannot do for customers' lives.

A scene from the film Back to School in which Rodney Dangerfield takes his first economics class and brings real-world business experience to a classroom exercise on widgets. It shows the gap between school and the real world.

A clip from Jurassic Park in which Lex says, "It's a Unix system, I know this," while navigating a 3D file system view.