rf engineering

A 2007 parody mocking Microsoft's Surface touch table, made by SarcasticGamer.

A Red Dwarf clip where Kryten fixes a toaster and finds it to be the most annoying machine in the universe, endlessly offering toast.

A short clip from the film Idiocracy showing a hospital reception computer where staff pick a condition from a board of simple pictorial buttons.

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.

An hour-long absurdist Lasagna Cat video in which John Blyth Barrymore muses philosophically on a single Garfield strip. It is set to the full score of Philip Glass's Kundun.

A Burnistoun sketch in which a voice-recognition elevator cannot understand two Scottish men saying the number eleven. It satirizes voice interfaces that fail on accents.

A one-minute clip of the Warcraft II sound card test in setup, where the test sample plays and the voice says the sound card works perfectly.

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

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.

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.

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 REACT episode where teenagers try Windows 95 for the first time and react to the retro interface and technology.

A short clip from Star Trek IV in which Scotty tries to talk to a 20th-century computer, picks up the mouse and says 'Hello, computer'.

A short CSI clip in which characters try to track a killer's IP address by writing a Visual Basic GUI. It is a famous example of absurd TV hacking.

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

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 short parody ad about iOS 4.0 running slowly on the 3G iPhone, made by a disappointed Apple customer.

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

A two-minute clip of the printer-smashing scene from the film Office Space, set to its rap soundtrack. The uploader assembled it as a cleaner version.

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.

Tom Scott-style absurdist research by tom7 for SIGBOVIK 2021, using machine learning to discover letterforms that are 'uppercaser' than uppercase A and lowercaser than lowercase. It is a comedic, technically inventive deep dive with fonts and a paper.

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 KRAZAM satirical sketch about hustle culture and productivity obsession in tech.

A comedy-music medley from the Australian band The Axis of Awesome showing that dozens of famous pop songs use the same four-chord progression. The performers cycle through a long list of hits over the same chords.

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.

Australian comedy group Axis of Awesome perform a sketch showing that dozens of pop hits share the same four chords. It was recorded at the 2009 Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

A clip from George Carlin's 2005 special Life Is Worth Losing, in which he argues that the powerful don't want an educated public capable of critical thinking.

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.

Tim Minchin performs his comedic beat poem 'Storm', a roughly nine-minute rant against homeopathy, alternative medicine and woolly thinking. It is delivered as a fast, rhyming monologue built around an encounter at a dinner party.

An English-subtitled version of Staplerfahrer Klaus, a gory dark-comedy German workplace safety film about the dangers of forklifts in warehouses.

Tom Lehrer performs his satirical song Who's Next, about the spread of nuclear weapons, with a spoken introduction. It is a short musical comedy piece from the Cold War era.

Daniel Radcliffe performs his party trick on The Graham Norton Show: singing Tom Lehrer's 'The Elements', the periodic table song, from memory. It is a two-minute talk-show clip.

The 1957 BBC Panorama April Fools' hoax report showing a Swiss family harvesting spaghetti from trees, republished by Switzerland Tourism. It is a short deadpan newsreel clip with a plummy narrator that famously fooled viewers who knew little about pasta.

A short parody clip in the 'Hitler learns about...' meme format, in which Hitler rants about git's confusing commands. It riffs on git's complexity and the Linus Torvalds and Facebook angle.

A Mr. Show sketch, 'Blow Up the Moon', in which characters cheerfully argue for blowing up the moon.

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.