Jerry Black

Hailing from Anchorage, Alaska, Jerry discovered his passion for comedy early on. At the tender age of 16, he performed his first stand-up gig, igniting a love for the stage that has continued to burn brightly. Decades later, after a career that took him from programmer to program manager across companies around the world, he found himself with one idea: pass that feeling to every engineer and IT pro who'd ever had something to say but nowhere to say it.

He's a tech veteran, stand-up comedian, and conference speaker who founded IT Misfits — the live comedy show and communication training community where technical professionals find their voice, build confidence, and occasionally bring the house down. He eventually landed in Phoenix with strong feelings about incident response, enterprise infrastructure, and why the funniest people in any room are almost always in IT.

Jerry has performed stand-up comedy across the United States, hosted live shows at venues from LA to Phoenix to Austin, spoken at tech conferences and corporate events, and coached software engineers, data scientists, IT managers, and cybersecurity professionals through writing and performing their first real set in front of a live audience. His material is pulled straight from real life — the war stories, the absurdities, the moments that are only funny in hindsight — which means his audiences don't just laugh, they recognize themselves.

He built IT Misfits because tech is a grind, and the people grinding through it deserve to be heard, to laugh, and to take up more space than their job title usually allows.

The mic is always open. He just had to build the stage first.

Speaking & Workshops

Jerry brings the IT Misfits framework to conference stages and corporate events as a hands-on session that gets people out of their seats and into real practice. Attendees work in small groups using the same techniques stand-up performers use to structure a message, read a room, and say the thing clearly enough that a stranger gets it on the first pass.

The result is a room full of technical professionals finally getting practical direction on the soft skills the industry keeps talking about: communication, confidence, and the kind of human connection that actually moves teams, clients, and careers forward.

Where Jerry's led tech professionals: