Funny / Silicon Valley

Season 1

• Erlich decides to take a lot of hallucinogenics and head to the desert in order to come up with a new company name. He ends up locking himself in a gas station bathroom overnight, writing "Pied Piper" with shit all over the walls, and kidnapping a child, who he believes is his reincarnated self from the same time period.
• In "Third Party Insourcing," Richard attempts to buy the drug Adderall from a neighborhood kid (since said kid was the most "street" person he could think of). The kid slaps him and laughs at his clueless efforts to get illegal drugs from a little kid. Richard returns to the house without Adderall and tells Erlich what's transpired. Erlich then personally confronts the kid:
  Erlich: You just brought piss to a shit fight, you little cunt! (slaps the kid upside the head and then throws his bike over a nearby hedge) Now you get in your fucking house and you get me five Adderall or I'll slit your fucking throat! You understand!? I'll kill your mother! I'll rape your father! I'll curb-stomp that little face so hard that your teeth will go flying, you little shit! Now go! Go! Go! Go! Get me five Adderall, right now!
• Jared takes an autonomous car after a meeting with Monica. However, the car unexpectedly changes destinations to Arallon, Peter Gregory's man-made island. The car drives itself into a loading dock and parks inside a shipping crate.
  Car: 103 hours to destination. Entering sleep mode.
• Erlich tries too hard to not be racist to Dinesh, Chuy the Latino graffiti artist, and an African-American police officer. Erlich offends all three by trying too hard to not offend them.
• The TeleHuman hologram in "Signaling Risk", which malfunctions almost immediately, stuttering and freezing like crazy. Eventually the hologram disappears:
  Assistant: Um, the audio's still working. You could just use that.
  Gavin: "The audio is working"? Excuse me?! I paid twenty million fucking dollars to acquire this company! Fuck you, the audio is working! Audio worked a hundred fucking years ago. You fucking piece of shi-i-i-i-i-i-!
  • Then when Gavin tries to connect using Hooli Chat instead, that glitches out too. He finally decides to just call Big Head's cell phone...and still can't get through due to bad reception.
• The ENTIRETY of the ending of “Proof Of Concept”. Pied Piper’s presentation starts, complete with epic lighting and Erlich starting it off on a badass note........only to suddenly get tackled by one of the judges on the account of Erlich having slept with his wife. A massive kerfuffle ensues. Cut to end credits.
  • Bertram’s deadpan reaction complete sells this moment.
  Bertram: I think he knows.
• In "Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency", Jared suggests that Pied Piper "pivot" to a different application since they're seemingly going to lose to Hooli. So he goes out on the street and asks random pedestrians whether they'd be interested in certain apps. The best one is when he stops a couple with a baby stroller:
  Jared: How much would it be worth to you if I told you I had a GPS app called Pied Piper, tracking the location of your child? I can follow your child anywhere, and there is nothing you can do to stop me! Most missing children are never found. Interested, very interested, or very interested?
  • It gets even better when the couple calls the police on him.
  Cop: Do you have any weapons or drugs on you?
  Jared: Why, yes.
  Cop: Adderall, this is a highly controlled substance. Is this yours?
  Jared: No, those belong to an underage kid who I brought to my house.
• If there was an Emmy category for "Outstanding Dick Joke", that would have to go to the "mean jerk time" scene in "Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency".
  • Which results further down the line in a scene where Erlich is interviewed by a female reporter Richard's revolutionary new compression algorithm, and Erlich tells her about the inspiration for it, forgetting to explain the context in the process.
    Female reporter: So, Richard wrote the code?
    Erlich: Richard wrote the code, yes, but the inspiration was clear. Let me ask you something...
    Female reporter: M-hmm?
    Erlich: How fast do you think you could jack off every guy in this room?
    (The female reporter is clearly shocked and disgusted.)
    Erlich: (Proudly) 'Cause I know how long it would take me. And I can prove it!
  • In the scene where Richard explains to TechCrunch Disrupt a more censored version of what inspired middle-out, you can see him doing masturbatory gestures.

Season 2

• Malaproper: Richard takes some of Elirch's already odd phrases and mixes them up worse when he's angry at a group of "negging" venture capitalists.
  Erlich: Do you know how many times I've gone into these rooms with nothing but a half of an ass in my hand? We're walking in there with three-foot cocks covered in Elvis dust.
  Richard: I'm covered in dust. I'm a three-foot dick, and I've got half an ass to go to some other company who's never gonna put me on a Jumbotron or throw balls at me.
• Richard and Erlich make the rounds of various venture capital firms to line up Series A funding. Erlich realizes that the ruder they are the more money the firms offer, comparing it to the "negging" technique pickup artists use. Cue a montage of Erlich being the biggest dick possible and various meetings. It ultimately ends with Erlich slapping his balls against a conference table and securing Pied Piper a $75 million valuation.
  Erlich: Well, thank you for meeting with us. We have a bunch of these things to go to. Hopefully with more tasteful artwork. And your logo looks like a sideways vagina! I find that to be racist. Don't you?
• Not since TNG has the mariachi band coda been used so effectively as the one interrupting a tense secret meeting between Richard and Gavin Belson.
• Hooli [XYZ] develops a prosthesis that can non-invasively read the wearer's brain waves. The monkey they're testing it on promptly uses it to masturbate and throw its own feces.
• The Hooli board suggest Gavin can win the lawsuit by finding someone who worked with Richard and who must have been a key part of the group in order to make it all work. That person: Big Head, who we see stumbling around, unable to get through company security, spilling his drink, spilling fries in the elevator and telling people they have to take the next one and ending up stuck on the company roof.
• Pretty much any scene with Erlich and Jian Yang, with the former's frustration with the latter's actions.
• Carla trolling Dinesh, Guilfoyle and Jared. In case of the latter, even Richard could barely hold back his laughter. As for the former two, this wasn't the first time she fucked with them, though the last time involved "gay porn and photoshop".
• Any time a tech Gavin has invested in fails.
• Gavin trying to find another product to compare the failure of Nucleus to. He goes from Windows Vista to iPhone 4 to Zune before finally being told that they're at around an Apple Maps-level disaster. It should be noted, this occurs during a focus group session, leading to this:
  Focus group leader: And who else felt this product is messed up? Allen, Lisa, Josh, Yana-
  Gavin (on other side of one-way glass) FUCK!!! (slams glass)
  Focus group leader: I'm sorry for the disturbance, Allen, Lisa, Josh, Yana.
• Dinesh and Guilfoyle using SWOT analysis to figure out if they should inform Jerkass Blaine of a fatal flaw in his calculations for a daredevil stunt. The opportunities include a possible grief threesome with Blaine's girlfriend and mom.
  • Only for Blaine to come in, as they're SWOT-ing, to apologize for his behavior and explain that he gets tense before a stunt because of the chance that he could die and how that would devastate his girlfriend (whom Dinesh has a crush on) and their children. Then Blaine sees the SWOT board...
  • The full board is hilarious [1].
• The pornography convention, with a bunch of stern, respectable old guys in suits behind nameplates like Let's Try Fisting, Non-Consensual Santa, and Poop On My Wife.
• This exchange from "Binding Arbitration":
  Gilfoyle: You mean to tell me this case hinges on whether people believe Richard had a girlfriend?
  Dinesh: We’re FUCKED!
• The black comedy that ensues after the maintenance guy sent to remove the camera from Pied Piper's condor egg feed gets stuck in the cave ala 127 Hours.
  • The Pied Piper team's attempts at keeping their system up and running as site traffic spikes. Walls get smashed, things catch on fire, and Erlich insults a real estate agent.
• Jared's familiar with Manny Pacquiao only as a Filipino Congressman and not as a boxer.
• Richard is driving as fast as he can to Raviga to dispute their decision to oust him as CEO of Pied Piper. He promptly runs over a robotic deer. The robot seems fine after the collision, but Erlich decides to fix that by kicking it himself.
  Stanford Engineer: They killed the BamBot!

Season 3

• Richard gives an impassioned speech about his vision for how Pied Piper can truly change the world...while loud horse sex is going on right next to him.
• The fear-mongering video for the company's new security setup, with a picture of Dinesh representing the immigrants who are trying to steal people's information.
• Dinesh becoming the undisputed Butt-Monkey of the group after buying a gold throat chain. He laments that even Jared is now scoring hits off him.
• The jaw-droppingly audacious "Shaggy Dog" Story of the very promising season-long plot of secretly building a Pied Piper platform out of Barker's sight getting immediately hamstrung when Richard trips on a hose and sends their plans right into Barker's hands. It's like the goofy sitcom version of the Red Wedding.
• Richard's Negated Moment of Awesome as he lays out exactly why Barker can't afford to fire the team, followed by threateningly leaning on the desk only to put his hands on two stacks of paper that slide out from under him.
  Gilfoyle: That was really badass, Richard. Until it wasn't.
• Doubling as a Moment of Awesome, Laurie finally decides that she's had enough of Jack Barker and fires his ass after a recent turn of events justify the action and makes it obvious how terrible his idea was. Erlich's reaction, and her reaction to his, is what makes the moment so funny.
  Erlich: Fuck me sideways!
  Laurie: Indeed.
• The entire bulldog scene, with Gavin using the bulldog's inbreeding as an analogy to explain why Nucleus failed. He keeps insulting the dog who is just relaxing in its chair. Made all the funnier by the fact that he's got a point.
  Gavin: A kindly pet or humanity's cruelest mistake?
  • What is Gavin's solution to end this "inbreeding"? Acquire EndFrame, half of which is comprised of Nucleus engineers Gavin had fired. Gavin utterly fails to realize this since he doesn't remember any of them, not even the brogrammers who worked at Hooli for over 7 years.
• Big Head's financial expenses including moving the pool in his home...only to move it back when he realized the first location was better.
• The reveal that Jared is very skilled at picking up women and having sex with them. He just decided to take a break from doing it this whole time so he could focus all of his energy on Pied Piper.
  Dinesh: Russ was right. "This guy fucks."
• Richard's absolutely disastrous attempt to explain to a focus group how Pied Piper works only to be totally out of his league as he literally cannot understand how people not in the tech world won't grasp what he's trying to do. Monica just sits there, staring in disbelief as it takes him roughly five hours to get them to understand something he could have explained in five minutes.
• Pipey, the saccharine mascot who becomes Pied Piper's last ditch attempt to make the absurdly complex platform understandable to the public. A horrified Erlich simply says "What in the name of fuck is that?"
• Gavin starts talking to the board using the analogy of a possum only to have one member say that "if you're bringing another live animal in here, this meeting is over." Gavin says he won't...and quickly waves off the two men bringing a possum in on a tray before the board sees them.
• After two seasons, Laurie reaches her Rage Breaking Point from the rest of the board waffling over the sale of Pied Piper. "Oh, for fuck's sake!"

Season 4

• Dinesh and Gavin's combined arrogance and stupidity managing to completely save Dinesh's bacon while royally screwing over Gavin: Dinesh skipped out on making sure the PiperChat contract complied with the law that kids under 13 needed parental permission, resulting in a combined set of fines in the billions. But as luck would have it, his repeated public statements about its similarity to Hooli's chat program gets Gavin to sue for ownership without doing any research, to which Dinesh is of course all too happy to comply. Gavin realizes how screwed he is upon seeing a focus group of mostly kids (and one incredibly nervous Dirty Old Man, and furiously bangs on the one-way mirror as we watch from inside the room.
• Erlich strikes a deal to give Jian-Yang free rent for a year in exchange for part of his new project which he assumes is a VR deal thanks to Nelson saying Jian-Yang was talking about "an occulus." It's only after the deal is made that Erlich finds out that Jian-Yang was saying "octopus."
• In a meeting, Erlich hits on the idea of "Shazam for food." He then starts talking to Jian-Yang in what he thinks is Chinese but quite clearly just gibberish.
• Pete making every effort to not get his fingerprints on Dinesh's laptop after finding out the company's new problem involves kids.
• Richard's Sanity Slippage as he seemingly doesn't sleep for a week trying to crack his open Internet idea, all while insisting he's perfectly fine. It ends with an Overly Long Gag as he kicks a hole in a closet and then gets his foot stuck.
  Gilfoyle: Yeah, not crazy. Opposite.
• Erlich and Jian-Yang's "Shazam for food" app gets everyone excited when it correctly identifies a hot dog on its first test. Then it turns out it designates literally everything else as "not hot dog."
• Russ, after a disagreement with Richard regarding whether the former should get a share in the decentralized internet idea, pisses on what he thinks is Richard's car. It's actually Erlich's car.
  Russ: (While whizzing on the car) Payback's a bitch, isn't it, Richard!? Whoo-hoo!
  Gilfoyle: I don't think he knows that that's not your car.
• Laurie offers Monica a chance to join her at a new company because "you're my best friend". Monica just offers a Flat "What".
  • Earlier, Monica is amazed that a woman so cold and business-obsessed as Laurie is pregnant. Then she learns this is Laurie's fourth child.
• Dinesh outdoes himself ruining his latest relationship: When Mia remarks she hacked the Freedom Towers in New York as well as his phone, he calls the FBI to have her arrested ...at her sister's wedding.
  • When Dinesh "protests" to cover himself, one female agent elbows him in the face to knock him out.
• The first test of Richard's new app has it do the exact opposite of what it's supposed to and merges the data on Dinesh and Gilfoyle's phones. After an attempt by Jared to hold onto both phones to keep them from going through each other's stuff, things devolve into a slap fight that ends with both phones destroyed and both guys insisting they "won".
• Gilfoyle's entire subplot during Season 4, Episode 7 where he gets annoyed with the voice of the smart fridge that Jian-Yang buys and spends the entire episode trying to bypass Jian-Yang's ten-character alphanumeric password to hack into the refrigerator's operating system. Gilfoyle succeeds by overclocking his personal server, Anton, and he changes the smart fridge's coding so that it mocks Jian-Yang instead.
• Richard freaks out over sleeping with one of the would-be partners on a deal and freaks out that "my dick has killed this company". He goes to talk to her and finds out it's okay ...as she relates how utterly horrible the sex was and it's best to just forget it all.
• Erlich is basically "fired" by Monica and Laurie although technically, he didn't actually work there.
  Laurie: I'll give you the finder's fee and $10,000 to just go away.
  • Erlich claims they need him to overcome the "toxic world" of a male-dominated business despite how they're both used to it.
  Erlich: Do you even know what mansplaining is?
  Monica: Of course, we know what mansplaining...
  Erlich: Mansplaining is when a man explains something to a woman that she already knows fully about.
• Jack goes to China to push the workers of a factory to basically work around the clock to get 9 million new phones made in days and insists that surely the workers can go beyond "maximum capacity". We immediately cut to a newscast of Jack being held hostage by the workers and calmly relating their demands for better treatment and wages.
• In the season finale, Gilfoyle breaks his glasses and has to use cat eye contact lenses. Made even funnier by how it serves absolutely no narrative purpose, with his vision problems never causing any issues.
• How was Erlich Put on a Bus? He gets stoned in an opium den and a frustrated Gavin decides to pay the owner enough money to let him stay there for five years.

Season 5

• Richard brings the gang to what they think is the new offices of a fancy place with huge open spaces and great furnishing. When they ask when the owners move out, Richard reveals the real offices: Basically, a cramped windowless room that's barely enough for them, let alone the 15 coders they want to hire.
  Dinesh: This is like a Black Site.
  Gilfoyle: This is not a black site because at least then, we'll be protected by the Geneva Convention.
  • Richard and Jared whisper where Richard is concerned about spending too much money. Gilfoyle snaps that they can hear every word from across the tiny room.
• Gavin is outraged the newly hired school of Hoolie programmers is dismissing him as "antiqued" as he was just named in an Innovators Hall of Fame. At which point, his assistants bring in the portrait of him and his class...where Richard is the only person under the age of 60 (one man in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank while another is represented by someone holding a photo as they're already dead).
• Richard runs behind his desk to vomit during a speech to his new employees, then Jared reminds him it's just a table and they can all still see him.
• Gilfoyle sets up his computer to put the song "You Suffer" as an alert at an ungodly volume every time the price of Bitcoin fluctuates, which turns out to be a lot, making everyone jump every time.
• The slow burn gag of Gavin's focus-grouped signature, which everyone but him can see looks like a penis.
• After Richard manages to convince a reluctant Jared to let them take Fiona back to Laurie, convincing him that everything will be okay and that he'll get to visit her from time to time, we Smash Cut to Laurie having Fiona brutally dismantled piece by piece so that she can sell her for parts as quickly as possible while a horrified Jared and Richard watch.
• During the season finale, Pied Piper needs the help of Colin and Galloo in order to keep their 51% and launch a patch to prevent Yao and Laurie Breem from doing what they want with the new decentralized internet. Dinesh and Jared are tasked with finding Colin. Once they get to the end of the park where Colin went off the grid, Dinesh screams out Colin's name when a camper tells Dinesh to shut up. The entire exchange is hilarious.
  Dinesh: COLIN!
  Camper: Will you shut the fuck up!?
  Jared: How would you like to die today, motherfucker!?
  Dinesh: No! It's not a real death threat, sir!
  • Later on, Dinesh gets pulled over by a cop for speeding. His way of getting off the hook? Letting the cop drive the Tesla car for a bit and experience zero to sixty in three seconds.

Season 6

• The guys find out that Colin's been gathering and selling user data to run ads on his game, the antithesis to the ethos of Piper Net. While looking over the game, Dinesh makes some sexually charged innuendos... which results in his computer screen being flooded with porn advertisements.
• Gavin Belson organizes a triathlon and does a godawful job of hiding his cheating.
• Gavin Belson plagarized his "tethics" pledge from Applebee's, Starbucks, and AARP, among other companies.
• Jian-Yang, predictably, has Richard in his phone as "Bitchard." Less than 30 seconds later, it's shown Monica has him under than name too.
• In what you could very well buy as a joke that the entire series was made to feature, what ultimately brings Pied Piper down once and for all? Their phones release a frequency that attracts waves upon waves of rats.
  Gavin: They literally became the Pied Piper. You cannot make that up!
  • Also the fact it was all to stop their code from becoming a self-reliant A.I. that could have ruined the world but the gang can never reveal it to anyone.
  • In the Distant Finale, Gavin is revealed to have become a pretty successful author of trashy Romance Novels. He still keeps Denpok around to help him write, and they frequently bicker like an old married couple.
  • A little Brick Joke shows that old ladies really like Gavin's books.
  • Jian Yang's fate - he's apparently faked his own death and become a crime boss.
  • Big Head somehow becomes the president of Stanford.
  • Laurie is in prison, with zero explanation. She’s also somehow gotten even worse at talking to people.
  Laurie: When people ask me about Pied Piper, I always tell them the same thing. (long pause) Are there other questions?
  Interviewer: Um, can you elaborate?
  Laurie: Yes.
  (long pause)
  Interviewer: Will you?
• The perfect punch line to the series: The gang tells a college student they were Pied Piper, expecting her to know them instantly...and it turns out she's never heard of them as ten years is an eternity in the tech world.