The hilariously bizarre launch of the most anticipated startup of the year.
A seated, tight-faced Olivia Munn grabbed the mic. "We were on it last night, it does work" she told a crowd of at least 100 tech journalists, TV reporters and venture capitalists. "This is not how it's really operating, I swear to fucking god." She, along with everyone else on the stage, had not been having a great morning.
She was in New York, along with Joel McHale, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jim Carrey, Ed Helms, Jimmy Fallon and Napster cofounders Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, to launch a startup called Airtime, and the presentation had ground to a halt for the fifth or sixth time, due to technical difficulties. She had also, just minutes ago, done this:
Yes, that's Snoop Dogg in the chat frame. Yes, Munn made this joke: "sorry, there's a white man calling, which means you have to go." And yes, people laughed.
Minutes later, a visibly frustrated Parker mused out loud, "nothing like a successful product demo," as Jim Carrey hammed it up over an Airtime video chat, plodding through the same bizarre reverse-use-case-simulation as all the other onstage celebrities: appearing on Airtime, then quickly revealing that he was, in fact, behind the curtain the whole time. Jim Carrey made a joke about his "pubes" then bounded out from stage left.
Joel McHale had by then appointed himself a sort of disaster control emcee for the evening, gamely drawing attention away from the technical glitches, perhaps even a little too well. About mid-way through — and I'm 99% sure I heard this correctly — Parker muttered sarcastically to McHale after unsuccessfully trying to take back the floor, "well, it's your show." McHale grimaced.
"I can't thank you guys enough, you took a completely fucked up situation... and actually salvaged it," Parker said to his celebrity panel, a group he told us were mostly friends, not targeted spokespeople. It had been two hours since we showed up, and we had barely talked about Airtime.
