“Hi there!” says an AI avatar of a clean-cut man dressed casually in a denim shirt, with a mostly empty bookcase in the background. “I’m Clark from Marlow & Finch. To get us started, why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself?”
The real human on the other end of the call—Graham Raabe, in glasses and ball cap—is more than ready to dive in. “Happy to, and happy to be here,” he tells his AI job interviewer. “I’m Chick Bongo. I’ve spent about 10 years in sales. Really good at managing badger margin, spent quite a bit of time with sprocket moss, particularly proud of my goosebuckle.”
“Managing badger margin sounds like a serious skill,” the unfazed bot replies. “And that goosebuckle experience is impressive.” Raabe continues to answer Clark’s boilerplate questions with complete nonsense, the fake interviewer echoing most of it in mechanical tones of approval and amazement. When the interviewer inquires what kind of salary range “Chick Bongo” has in mind, Raabe replies, “Six hundred.” Clark interprets this to mean $600,000, calling it a “bold number,” but adds that he admires the “confidence” in the ask.
Raabe isn’t really after a new gig. Actually, in addition to his job as manager of a sales team in the fintech space, he is among a crop of comedians who have recently blown up online—and secured talent representation—by figuring out inventive ways to troll and satirize AI. Absurd, rapid-fire exchanges with agents like Clark have become Raabe’s signature comic routine, one that has doubled his Instagram audience from around 50,000 to more than 100,000 followers over the past two months.
Raabe tells WIRED that he’s been pursuing stand-up comedy and screenwriting as hobbies for the better part of a decade, and trained in improv and sketch at the renowned Upright Citizens Brigade theater. It wasn’t until May of this year, he says, that he started experimenting with office humor videos on Instagram and TikTok.
“I actually didn’t start with any AI-adjacent content,” Raabe says. “It was primarily more of a down-the-middle, workplace comedy play, and I was just encouraged by the results and the feedback that I got.”
Raabe has a knack for clever linguistic play, and one of his earlier bits involved substitutions for stock or cliché phrases you might hear in a meeting: instead of “the ball is in your court,” he suggests in one clip, try “the hawk is on your glove” or “that’s your microwave beeping” or “the decision goblin lives at your address.”