Remember the infamous Silicon Valley joke about hand-job math from the first season? So do Silicon Valley stars Kumail Nanjiani and Martin Starr! They stepped onstage at the Breakthrough Prize awards ceremony Sunday night at the NASA Ames Research Center, where they were presenting one of the awards for scientific breakthroughs in front of an esteemed group of physicists, scientists, mathematicians, and Mark Zuckerberg. “You guys are mapping the world around us and the world inside us, solving mysteries that have plagued us since the dawn of consciousness,” said Nanjiani. “Our biggest accomplishment is a joke about how fast we could masturbate every guy in an auditorium.”
“And we didn’t even write that,” Starr continued. “They didn’t even use our improvs when we edited it. So we thought maybe we could join the ranks of accomplished people and maybe bring that joke to life here tonight.” So they did:
Nanjiani: So we did the math backstage, it’ll take us about …
Starr: Thirty-seven-and-a-half minutes, maybe, between that and 14 hours. So, if you guys are onboard.
Nanjiani: Depending on how drunk you are … Get ready.
Starr: Which side do you want?
Nanjiani: I’ll take these guys.
Starr: Okay, I’ll go here. Okay, go!
A complete two seconds of hesitant silence later, the audience — full of Nobel laureates, Emmy and Grammy award-winners, and NASA scientists — evidently unfamiliar with the complexities of jerking someone off, Nanjiani and Starr ended the bit.
“Ah, you called our bluff! Hey, remember when we told a room of scientists that we would masturbate them?” said Nanjiani. “Yeah, I do, it just happened,” said Starr, before introducing the next winner, an optogenetics researcher.
