Wait, is PowerPoint cool now?

D.C. consultant Seamus O’Neill stood before an attentive audience and cleared his throat. “Some of you may be wondering how rats got to D.C.,” he began. “Like most residents, rats came to D.C. for work.”

The crowd laughed, as O’Neill, 24, continued in earnest. “You may think I am joking,” he said. “But indeed rats are very resourceful creatures, and they have followed humans wherever we have gone for millennia.”

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As O’Neill spoke, slides of a PowerPoint presentation flashed across the screens of mounted TVs around the room, visualizing his arguments with graphs and short bullet points: How rats became more interconnected through the Silk Road and trade routes. How they carried the bubonic plague, wiping out between 30 and 60 percent of the population of almost every country between China and Portugal. How some of these rodents found fame (including Remy from “Ratatouille” and Stuart Little). How he calculated the rat-to-human ratio in D.C. (allegedly 3:2) and it was worse than New York City’s (allegedly 1:2). And how he imagined the media (including this publication) would craft their headlines “if they covered the rat issue with the level of attention and analytical analysis that it truly deserves.”

O’Neill wasn’t addressing a neighborhood town hall. Or city council members. Or a Tomcat boardroom. He was speaking to a group of about 20 or so bar-goers huddled over beers and half-priced burgers at a pub in Adams Morgan.

In recent months, O’Neill and other locals have convened at Tight Five Pub to deliver presentations about their niche interests, hidden pastimes and hot takes. That July night, his “Oh, Rats” slideshow was accompanied by another presenter’s pitch deck on how he ghosted his girlfriend and started a new dating app; a guide to impressions in French; a math lecture on infinite sets; and a thorough breakdown of what might have happened if Richard M. Nixon had defeated John F. Kennedy in 1960.

“It’s nice to take a load off after work,” O’Neill said. “It’s basically a free comedy show, and maybe you’ll learn something too.”

PowerPoints have long dredged up flashbacks of dull meetings and interminable briefings, with some even calling for the presentation software to be banned. But it’s gotten a makeover in recent years, with millennials and Gen Zers repurposing the software for social entertainment: A workplace and educational tool by day has become a zany social game by night. Even PowerPoint’s developer, Microsoft, has co-signed the trend — offering a party template that participants can download (though some users are turning to its rival tools like Canva and Google Slides) and imparting advice for creating a presentation. “Make it more visually appealing — this isn’t your Father’s PowerPoint,” notes Microsoft’s site.

Indeed, a scroll through #powerpointnight TikTok uncovers thousands of unconventional, unhinged and unserious slideshows presented at different parties. There’s “Men I Talked About in Therapy.” And “How My Friends Would Undoubtedly Die in The Hunger Games.” Others are thematic, such as a PowerPoint night to “finally figure out what all your friends do for work.” “Pitch a Friend” lets presenters create slide decks to help their single pals find potential matches in the crowd.

Brand accounts, of course, hardly ever miss an opportunity to weigh in. “Topics are a solid 💯,” Canva commented on one viral post. On another, Microsoft wrote: “We love a Pedro [Pascal] PowerPoint (even though y’all used Google [crying smile emoji])”

In more intentional moments, users have turned to the software for planning friend group trips, celebrating bachelorette parties, persuading their parents to let a friend sleep over or buy them Taylor Swift tour tickets, coming out to their family members or revealing their job as a stripper. PowerPoint even played a role in Sydney Sweeney’s booming career: The actress revealed she once made a slideshow to persuade her parents to move from Spokane, Wash., to Los Angeles.

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The concept was first documented in 2012 when three engineering students at Ontario’s University of Waterloo started a party called “Drink Talk Learn (DTL).” It quickly spread to other cities including Toronto, Seattle, San Francisco, Edmonton and New York, one participant told BuzzFeed.

The pandemic, which compelled friends to leverage workplace software tools for social engagement, gave it another boost. As Zoom happy hours persisted, PowerPoint presentations emerged, allowing hosts to rant, inform, explain, reveal or geek out about a topic or event of their choosing.

“In the ‘Zoom times,’ I felt like I was presenting a lot,” said Jaibin Mathew, 23.

During the event in Adams Morgan, Mathew gave a vibrant ’70s-themed Canva presentation, explaining why everyone should be wearing Silly Bandz — rubber bracelets in various shapes and colors that were especially popular among kids in the early 2010s. At one point, he playfully suggested that everyone embrace microplastics in their lives.

“I have many plastics — I wear them on my arms,” he said. “I hope they reach into my bloodstream.”

Growing up, Mathew always found PowerPoint to be stressful, recounting a particularly difficult seventh-grade slideshow he made about J. Robert Oppenheimer. But in the context of social settings, he appreciates how they allow him to connect with other people.

On the night he gave his Silly Bandz presentation, he didn’t know a single person at the bar. But after presenting, he met a handful of locals and even gave away a few bracelets he had brought with him.

“I think [the PowerPoints] are a really fun social lubricant because then they know something about you that they can ask you about,” Mathew said later in a phone interview. “And then it’s like a really great conversation starter.”

Users say that what makes PowerPoint a fun format for social activities is how easily the tool can be subverted, inspiring them to rewrite the rules of presentation etiquette and dream up NSFW topics that satirize the stuffy settings from which they originated.

“I think the fun part of a PowerPoint presentation is that it’s a topic you probably wouldn’t or shouldn’t present about in a lot of contexts,” Mathew said. “It’s the way a lot of fun performances are — it’s just turning something normal on its head.”

The structural nature of PowerPoints (distilling research into short bullet notes and key findings) can also weed out some of the clumsy and awkward aspects of regular social conversation — where folks can stumble over words, lose their train of thought and excitedly talk over one another. With PowerPoint parties, it gives everyone the chance to have the floor without distractions or interruptions — save for the outbursts of cheers and laughter.

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Philip Mayer, a transportation researcher and former teacher, began hosting D.C.’s event at Tight Five Pub in May (though the venue has changed to Johnny Pistola’s on the first Wednesday of every month after Tight Five Pub abruptly shuttered its doors).

As a former middle school and high school teacher, Mayer, 40, would make presentations for his students. During the pandemic when schools were migrating to online classrooms, Mayer would kick off his hybrid lessons with a quick “cool thing of the day” slide deck, thrilling students with fun facts about Soviet vending machines or the ravens of the Tower of London.

“Fortunately, it was good at getting people to show up on time,” he said. “Unfortunately, a lot of people would just log in, watch the cool thing of the day and then log out.”

Mayer even showed one to his date when he participated in The Washington Post’s Date Lab series in 2020. “Some people were like ‘don’t do that — that’s the worst thing you possibly could do’” he said. “But she was into it, and people in the comments liked it a lot.”

In D.C., where Mayer says there’s a huge appetite for trivia and stand-up comedy, PowerPoint Night is the perfect marriage of both of them.

“I just need people to understand that we’re not doing, like, quarterly sales reports with the participants.”

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