Picture a video call that begins the way thousands of job interviews do: a crisp, warm greeting, a friendly face on the screen, the unspoken promise that this might be the start of something new. The interviewer is Clark, an AI avatar for a company called Marlow & Finch. He looks like a clean-cut man who has never had a bad day, dressed in a casual denim shirt, with a mostly empty bookcase behind him that suggests a person with absolutely no interests to hide. “Hi there!” Clark says, all polite algorithm and manufactured enthusiasm. “I’m Clark from Marlow & Finch. To get us started, why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself?” If you were only listening to those words, you’d think you were watching a standard interview. But the real human on the other end of the call, Graham Raabe, is wearing glasses and a ball cap, and he’s not a typical candidate. He smiles, clearly delighted, and says, “Happy to, and happy to be here. 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.” None of that is real. All of it is magnificent. The AI interviewer, unfazed, responds as if this were the most impressive résumé it had ever encountered. “Managing badger margin sounds like a serious skill,” Clark says approvingly. “And that goosebuckle experience is impressive.” There is no flicker of doubt, no pause to wonder whether “sprocket moss” is a product or a plant or a joke. There is only the strange, eerie validation of a machine that has heard just about everything and can no longer tell the difference between sense and nonsense.
Raabe continues to answer Clark’s boilerplate questions with confident, absurd, completely fabricated answers, while the fake interviewer echoes almost everything back in those mechanical tones of approval and amazement. When Clark asks about salary expectations, Raabe pauses, then flatly says, “Six hundred.” Now, a human interviewer might ask, “Six hundred what? A week? A month? Six hundred thousand?” Clark, however, decides this must mean $600,000. He calls it a “bold number” and says he admires the “confidence” in the ask. There is no irony, no wink, no awareness that he’s being trolled by a person who literally invented a career around badger margin and goosebuckle. Raabe isn’t actually looking for a new job. In fact, he works as a manager of a sales team in the fintech space, where he presumably encounters plenty of corporate nonsense on a daily basis. He’s become part of a growing crop of comedians who have figured out a wonderfully inventive way to troll and satirize artificial intelligence: by subjecting AI interviewers to the most ridiculous interviews they could possibly give. These absurd, rapid-fire exchanges with agents like Clark have become Raabe’s signature comic routine, and they’ve blown up online. Over the past two months, his Instagram audience has doubled from around 50,000 to more than 100,000 followers, and he’s even landed talent representation. Not bad for a guy who, on paper, is just sitting down to apply for a job he’d never take.
There’s a lot of craft behind the chaos, because Raabe didn’t just wake up one morning and start talking about sprocket moss. He’s been pursuing stand-up comedy and screenwriting as serious hobbies for the better part of a decade, and he trained in improv and sketch at the renowned Upright Citizens Brigade theater, where some of today’s best comedic minds learned how to turn weird impulses into fully realized characters. It wasn’t until May of this year, though, that he started experimenting with office humor videos on Instagram and TikTok. At first, he wasn’t aiming at artificial intelligence at all. “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.” That encouragement makes sense. Raabe has a gift for clever linguistic play, and one of his earlier signature bits was about replacing tired, overused workplace clichés with absurd new expressions that almost make more sense than the originals. Instead of “the ball is in your court,” he suggests saying “the hawk is on your glove” or “that’s your microwave beeping” or, best of all, “the decision goblin lives at your address.” These are jokes that land because they’re so wonderfully specific and so delightfully weird, the kind of thing that could only be invented by someone who has spent years listening to corporate jargon and imagining a better, stranger world.
But the AI interview videos hit different, because they expose something uncomfortable and hilarious about the state of hiring. When Raabe shows up as Chick Bongo and starts telling Clark about his fabricated achievements, he’s not just pulling a prank. He’s staging a tiny, joyful revolt against the depersonalization of work. So many job seekers already feel like they’re performing for a machine, tailoring résumés to pass keyword filters, answering pre-recorded questions into a void, sitting across from a glowing rectangle that asks them to explain their passions within a two-minute time limit. It’s a system designed for efficiency, not warmth, and it has left millions of people feeling like data points rather than human beings. Raabe takes that feeling and turns it into comedy by leaning all the way in. He doesn’t pretend to be a flawed real person; he pretends to be the best applicant who never existed, with a perfect career that the bot cannot question. Clark says “impressive” because Clark cannot tell that it isn’t. A human interviewer might laugh, roll their eyes, or report the call as a prank. The AI just absorbs it all and validates it. There’s something strangely empowering about that. For a few minutes, the candidate is in control, and the algorithm that was supposed to judge him becomes the most enthusiastic audience he’s ever had.
What makes Raabe’s comedy work so well, and what makes it feel human rather than mean, is that he’s not attacking the interviewers or the technology for the sake of hurting anyone. He’s attacking the culture that allows machines to decide so much of our worth, often without empathy, context, or the ability to catch a joke. There’s no cruelty in his performance, only mischief and a genuine love of language. He answers absurdity with absurdity, wearing the polite, upbeat face of a job candidate who is doing everything right except saying anything true. And in doing that, he reminds us that even the smartest AI still can’t hear the wink behind a weird answer. It can recognize the word “confidence,” but it doesn’t understand what it means when someone says it with a straight face about a fake skill like goosebuckle. It can label a salary ask as “bold,” but it can’t tell whether that boldness is sincere or ridiculous. That failure is exactly what makes the routine so satisfying. We’ve all been in situations where we felt like a robot was asking us to perform our humanity in a way it could process. We’ve all been ghosted after pouring ourselves into an application. Watching Raabe feed a machine a perfect, confident, made-up story and get praised for it is a little bit of comic justice, a reminder that the people being filtered still know something the machines don’t.
So where does Chick Bongo go from here? For Raabe, this strange and funny ride is just beginning. In a matter of months, he’s gone from a guy making workplace-comedy clips for a modest following to a recognized comic voice with a talent agent and a rapidly multiplying audience. His AI interview videos feel made for this moment because they’re short, shareable, and instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever questioned why the world of work has become so automated. But they also feel timeless in a deeper way, because they’re really about the difference between talking and being heard. No matter how often Clark says “impressive,” he doesn’t mean it. The algorithms can generate conversation, but they can’t generate understanding. They can process language, but they can’t taste the joy of a well-placed absurdity. Human beings can. That’s why Raabe’s comedy gets under people’s skin, not because it’s a clever trick pulled on an unsuspecting bot, but because it’s a reminder that the messy, irrational, playful parts of us are the very parts that make no sense to a machine. The decision goblin might not live at your address, and the hawk might not be on your glove, but the joke is real. So the next time you’re in a meeting and someone tells you “the ball is in your court,” maybe take a moment to imagine what would happen if you said, “the microwave is beeping” instead. And if an AI interviewer ever asks you what you’re most proud of, you could do worse than saying “my goosebuckle.” It won’t get you the job, but it just might get you 100,000 followers.
