Want to Sign With a Hollywood Agent? Start Making Fun of AI

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“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.”

Then Raabe started using AI bots to “quiz” him on this type of corporate jargon—his chatbot challenged him, for example, to come up with a euphemism for explaining that his team walked into a meeting unprepared. (“We brought forks to a soup party” was his twist on the phrase.)

Finally, Raabe hit upon the bizarro AI interviewer format. Though he’s never personally endured a bot screening for employment, he was aware of the trend and saw potential in the interview agents from the AI research lab Tavus. (“Screen thousands,” the tool’s marketing copy reads. ”Miss nothing.”) The Tavus bots, Raabe found, could be customized to deliver the conversational rhythms and escalation he needed for a video sketch, and he launched a popular series called “How to Fail Your AI Interview,” in which he derails calls with the avatars with digressive tactics—claiming to have known the bot in college, for example, or insisting on “icebreakers” before the interview begins.

“Most of my comedy is to play off straight men, and AI is the ultimate straight man to improv against,” Raabe explains.

The concept quickly took off, with commenters sharing their own frustrating experiences in real AI interview scenarios. It was around when he began this transition into AI comedy that he gained representation at Dulcedo Management, a talent agency with clients throughout North America, including influencers, models, athletes, and creators. That placed him in a comedy cohort with creators Matt Husk (@husk.irl) and Sam Wassef (@ahh.gpt), two other content creators whose viral AI trolling led to agent deals despite—or perhaps in some way because of—entertainment studios rapidly integrating the tech into production workflows.

Alex Melendez, associate director of gaming and entertainment at Dulcedo, tells WIRED that the company came across Raabe when he had fewer than 10,000 followers and were instantly taken with his sharp timing and original, well-executed premises. As for the AI interview videos, he says that Raabe is mining rich territory.

“There's something inherently funny about the contradiction surrounding AI right now,” Melendez explains. “We're constantly hearing about how it's going to transform industries and replace jobs, and then you see it struggle with something incredibly basic. That disconnect creates a lot of comedic opportunity.” He feels that Raabe and others “are giving audiences a way to laugh at something that can otherwise feel intimidating or overwhelming,” and that the rapid evolution of AI means a steady flow of new material.

“Every development brings another moment that makes people stop and think, ‘What is actually happening?’” Melendez says. “Comedy has always been a way to make sense of cultural shifts, and AI is no exception.”

And though AI may be the butt of these jokes, many tech developers and companies seem to be all for it. “I've gotten multiple DMs from people who are product managers at companies that build AI video avatars like this,” Raabe says. “They've told me that they love to see people having fun with the tools, and occasionally I've gotten messages from product managers who are like, ‘Thanks for pointing out that particular skill gap because now we know how to fix it.’”

Likewise, the surreal and wildly viral dialogues between Matt Husk and OpenAI’s ChatGPT have exposed the weaknesses of the LLM, forcing the company to acknowledge these shortcomings. In his videos, Husk (as he is known across his social media accounts) typically asks the chatbot for some kind of help, with his theoretical problems ranging from drowning in quicksand to simple challenges like counting to a hundred. Without fail, the chatbot cheerfully botches the job, and it tends to gaslight Husk about getting the answer wrong if he presses it to admit fault.

Husk’s content has earned him some 2 million followers combined across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, as well as a deal with the talent agency Unicorn, where he’s represented by Ali Fischbein, founder of the production company Lil Fish Comedy. (Fischbein declined to comment for this article.) And as with Raabe, Husk’s rise as a social media star has coincided with a role as pressure-tester for his favored product.

In April, on the tech podcast Mostly Human, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was prompted to react to a Husk video in which he used ChatGPT as a stopwatch and found that it measured a span of a few seconds as lasting “around 10 minutes.” Altman laughed at the glitch, claiming that it was a “known issue,” and predicted that it would be another year before the voice model could set an accurate timer.

Not everyone in this scene is examining areas where AI might be improved, however. Sam Wassef, who has more than 860,000 followers as @ahh.gpt on Instagram, instead embodies a humanoid parody of a chatbot, delivering a pitch-perfect impression of the inanities and non sequiturs you’ve come to expect from these pioneering models, often while guzzling water by the gallon. Wassef’s shorts featuring this blathering character make up a mysterious countdown—he is a third of the way through a planned run of a hundred posts—and have expanded to cinematic scope. One of the latest videos sees him prattle on about the bright future of AI as the camera gradually reveals that he is standing alone in the center of a barren mall among dark, empty storefronts.

Wassef is signed with talent managers Mikayla Haycock and Adam Loria at Night Media, who declined to comment for this article. Their involvement is more evidence that the entertainment world is looking for people with inventive angles on the AI zeitgeist, which, as Melendez says, is an indicator that they can apply the same comedic skill set to other topics and platforms. The ultimate goal for a client like Raabe, Husk, or Wassef, he explains, “is for audiences to become invested” in them as a performer, not just “the format or trend” that gave them their start. The name of the game is growth and longevity regardless of where public discourse may go next.

“Virality can open the door,” he says, “but it's the talent behind it that builds a lasting career.”