HBO’s Silicon Valley is probably best known for the incredibly in-depth, mathematically accurate dick joke that saved the day in its season finale. If there’s any justice in the world, the show’s legacy will also include this scene from Sunday’s episode, featuring an armless monkey named Kiko. God help you if you can watch it without laughing.
If you didn’t see the episode, Entertainment Weekly has the full rundown and backstory to get you caught up, but here’s the short version: The nemesis of our heroes, the CEO of a Google-like tech company called Hooli, has created a new division of the company that focuses on outlandish dream-like projects. The co-heads of the division are a brilliant scientist named Professor Davis Bannercheck and a well-meaning nincompoop named Big Head who was only promoted to inflate his value to the company for the purposes of winning a lawsuit.
While Big Head focused on building a wicked-ass potato gun, Bannercheck turned his attention to the noble goal of providing mind-controlled robotic arms to an armless monkey. A monkey who proceeds, much to the chagrin of the genius who just spent huge amounts of time and money on the project, to masturbate furiously as soon as the arms are turned on, and then fling poop at the glass. Stop reading this awful description and watch the scene.
And if you laughed at all this as hard as I did, we are definitely not alone.
The scene got a big response from everyone at the table read (“I do remember [HBO president of programming] Michael Lombardo probably laughed at that scene harder than we’ve ever seen him laugh at anything,” says Berg) as well at the shoot. Recalls (actor Josh) Brener, who watched the scene being filmed from a bank of monitors in a nearby room: “It is the hardest that I’ve laughed on set in my entire life,” he testifies. “It was unbelievable. If there’s anything that’s come near the dick-to-floor scene, it’s the monkey. Everyone was cracking up, but we were getting shushed. You have to be super delicate around the monkey—there can be no sudden movements, no noises—it’s like you’re working with the most temperamental A-list celebrity that you can’t make eye contact with.”
Imagine having a job where you spend all day working on a joke about a monkey using robot arms to jerk off, and then getting a huge pat on the back from your boss about it. If that ain’t the dream, I don’t know what is.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)
