shor's algorithm

A short romantic comedy by Ted Nelson about the 'microcircuitry of love', with Doug Engelbart as his father and Stewart Brand as the villainous CEO.

The first episode of Nathan Barley, Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker's British sitcom satirizing hip media and startup scenesters in mid-2000s Shoreditch. Cynical writer Dan Ashcroft finds himself idolized by the moronic Nathan Barley.

A two-minute satirical short film in which a woman leaves her phone at home and notices how everyone around her is absorbed in their screens. It became a viral comment on phone distraction and social disconnection.

'Skwerl' is a short film by Brian and Karl made entirely in fake English, imitating how English sounds to people who don't speak it. It was made for Kino Sydney and shown on QI.

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 very short humorous clip titled 'I used to be with it', playing on the line that they changed what 'it' was. It is a brief meme-style video with no substantive content.

A short comedic complaint by ProZD about YouTube search failing to surface his own video even when searching its exact title. It illustrates how poor search results have become.

Neel Kolhatkar's satirical short film parodies modern education and political correctness. It shows how obsession with inclusive speech makes plain communication difficult.

A short clip of Bill Hicks's stand-up bit telling marketers and advertisers to kill themselves, which is a harsh critique of advertising.

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 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 short compilation of Steve Ballmer energetically shouting and dancing on stage at Microsoft events, including the famous developers chant.

Kung Fury is a 30-minute crowd-funded 80s action comedy about a kung fu cop who travels back in time to kill Hitler, packed with retro tropes.

A short scene from the British sitcom Yes Prime Minister in which officials describe 'salami tactics' for invading a country slice by slice. Each small step is too minor to justify a major response.

A clip from Little Britain in which a bureaucrat answers every request with 'computer says no'.

A very short clip from the children's cartoon Arthur riffing on the line about not believing everything you read on the internet.

A short sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Sound, the BBC radio comedy, about a safety measure that works perfectly and so gets no credit for the lack of disasters.

A one-minute clip from Barack Obama's 2008 Google visit in which Eric Schmidt asks him the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers. Obama answers that bubble sort would be the wrong choice.

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 humorous 10-minute parody sequel to Erlang: The Movie, in which Erlang's creators discuss the aging language and meet a surprise helper. It plays on the Outlaw Techno Psychobitch joke for OTP.

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.

An Onion Talks satire in which a young media professional pitches compost-powered cars, offering the idea itself and leaving all implementation to others.

A two-minute comedy sketch in which a woman describes her problems while a visible nail sticks out of her head, and her partner keeps trying to fix it instead of listening. It dramatizes the gap between wanting empathy and being offered solutions.

A short satirical segment from Charlie Brooker's Newswipe that lampoons the formulaic conventions of television news reporting, from stock shots to filler street interviews and news-speak.

A clip from Yes Prime Minister in which Sir Humphrey shows how leading questions can make a survey support or oppose national service. It is a short satirical scene.

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.

Velcro Brand's legal team makes a short, humorous ad asking people not to use "velcro" as a noun or verb and to say hook and loop instead. It is a tongue-in-cheek lesson in defending a trademark against genericization.

Tom Murphy's satirical SIGBOVIK 2007 presentation, delivered under a pseudonym, proving that generalized Super Mario Bros. is NP-complete. It is a short, deadpan take on a complexity theory result.

A short clip from Bill Hicks' final special, Revelations, in which he describes life as just a ride. It is a philosophical, calming monologue.

Economist-comedian Yoram Bauman delivers a humorous translation of Mankiw's ten principles of economics for the uninitiated. It was presented at the AAAS humor session in 2007.

A short Last Week Tonight segment where John Oliver stages a statistically representative climate debate, with Bill Nye facing a crowd of dissenters. It satirizes false balance in media coverage.

A short clip from The West Wing in which staffers meet a group advocating the Peters projection and challenge the Mercator map. It was shown as geography humor at a Salt Lake GIS user group meeting.

A short KRAZAM comedy sketch satirizing corporate tech life, where a worker reckons with having delivered value at the cost of his soul, complete with Slack chimes.

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 Yes Minister clip in which the civil servant explains why Britain joined the European Union, delivered as satire of British foreign policy.

The first episode of the Yacht Rock web series, a comedic parody about the smooth soft-rock musicians of the late 1970s and early 80s. It is a short, scripted sketch set at Koko's Boat House.

A short clip from The West Wing in which characters argue for the Gall-Peters map projection over Mercator. It dramatizes how standard maps distort the relative size of countries.

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.

A comedy song by Dan and Dan that summarizes the British newspaper The Daily Mail using only its headlines. It satirizes the paper's habit of claiming everything causes or cures cancer.

A short comedy skit by Ryan Long satirizing how woke activists and racists end up agreeing on many things.