You can be pardoned if you haven’t been paying too much attention to HBO’s freshman series, Silicon Valley. It comes on after Game of Thrones, and more often than not, you’re either recuperating from another George R.R. Martin death, or you’ve switched over to Mad Men. Still, the series has quietly put up a solid first season, one that satirized the tech industry better than anything you will likely ever see on the subject.
Granted, while the entire show is amusing, the real reason to watch Silicon Valley are Martin Starr and Kumail Nanjiani, who — as Gilfoyle and Dinesh — make up the best bromance on TV since J.D. and Turk. If you get some time this summer and you haven’t seen Silicon Valley, you really should check it out for them alone.
One of the best reasons why was last night’s season finale, which hinged upon the greatest dick joke ever told. Here’s some context: Basically, the team of Pied Piper — which had developed a compression algorithm — was in a Techcrunch competition readying their presentation. They had made it to the finals, but their biggest rival in the competition had given a presentation that more or less assured that Pied Piper would suffer a humiliating defeat. But Erlich (T.J. Miller), the team’s presenter, refused to give up, saying to the rest of the team, “We’re going to win even if I have to go into the auditorium and personally jerk off every guy in the audience.”
The next scene was nothing short of television history, beautifully combining science, math, and boners into one perfect dick joke. Because these are computer programmers, see, and they are desperate, and they are brilliant, and so naturally, they developed an algorithm to determine how many guys Erlich could jerk off in ten minutes. This is where the calculation began (with Dinesh offering the entry point into the equation):
“Even if he’s jerking two at a time, they’re 800 guys in that room, so 400 times whatever the ‘mean jerk time,’ [which is] equal to 400 total jerks and a two dick rate.”
In other words: [T = (800 x mJT) / 4]
But it didn’t stop there, because Gilfoyle figured how Erlich could jerk off FOUR men at the same time. How? Well, you would have to jerk off two guys on either side, and their dicks would have to be tip to tip. Obviously.
From there, the scene unfolded magically: They figured out the equation for dick jerking by pre-sorting guys by dick-to-floor ratio, taking into account their “complementary shaft angles,” and calculating the orgasm threshold while also factoring in girth similarity and a metric for stamina, while also taking into account the ability to “hot swap dicks in and out, so that on a down stroke you bring a new one in, so on the stroke up, you’re not wasting any energy.”
It was breathtaking. By the end of the scene, the equation looked like this:
Tell me that’s not the most beautiful equation you’ve ever seen.
It’s not embeddable, but you can currently watch the clip on Youtube.
