This article was originally published on the EIDR website in April of 2026. Pulling an all-nighter...
This article was originally published on the EIDR website in January of 2026.
If you’ve ever received – or sent – a memo, email, or inappropriately long text message similar to the above, then do we have a list of absurdist workplace comedies for you. (Trigger Warning: If you currently work in an environment where these shows could reasonably be confused with a hidden camera documentary, you may wish to go to your happy place now.)
Workplace comedies abound: coworkers bicker, managers are mildly ridiculous, and the biggest crisis is who stole someone’s lunch. Surreal and absurdist movies and TV shows are easy enough to find: ranging from the visually disturbing (Un Chien Andalou, 1929) to the delightfully silly (The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen, 1988). It’s the intersection of the two in the Venn diagram of genre that we’re looking at today: the absurdist workplace comedy (and occasionally very dark comedy) where the printer is possessed; the corporate mission statement is a mystic incantation; HR speaks in riddles; a team-building exercise becomes a loyalty test; and the office itself seems to have a personality – and it doesn’t like you. No matter how absurd, surreal, or far-fetched the premise, the strangest part is that we all recognize and relate to it.
Absurdist workplace comedies aren’t really about work: they’re about the emotional and psychological side-effects of work: alienation, powerlessness, identity drift, meaningless rituals, enforced cheerfulness, and the creeping suspicion that you are spending your life doing things that don’t really deserve your time. This form thrives as work becomes more abstract and more performative – when we stop making physical things and spend our time “delivering value,” “aligning stakeholders,” and “optimizing throughput.” The less tangible the work becomes, the more naturally it turns into satire. Absurdity isn’t something the genre adds. It’s something it reveals.
A good absurdist workplace comedy does one crucial thing: it makes you laugh, then makes you uncomfortable because you laughed. The focus of these shows has evolved along with the workplace and the work we do:
- Late-20th century corporate expansion (cubicles, middle-management sprawl, the cult of “professionalism”) gave us the modern office as a comedy stage.
- Post-2000s hyper-managerial culture (KPIs, surveillance, performance metrics, constant restructuring) pushed the office toward psychological horror.
- The post-pandemic era, with remote work, hybrid work, “culture” initiatives, and a widening gap between corporate speech and human reality, made workplace absurdism feel less like exaggeration and more like documentary.
(If this is all hitting too close to home, this may be a good time for a brief visit to your happy place.)
At its best, absurdist workplace comedy serves several purposes at once:
- Deflate power: The workplace runs on hierarchy, and hierarchy runs on seriousness. Absurdity punctures the “importance” of the powerful by treating their rituals as nonsense, because sometimes they are.
- Expose the hidden rules: Office life is full of invisible social laws: who gets credit, who gets ignored, what tone is allowed, what emotions must be suppressed, and what language must be used even when it means nothing.
- Give shape to the dread: Even good jobs can create a low-level existential stress: the sense of time leaking away into procedures. This genre gives that feeling a shape: a maze of hallways, an endless form, a department that doesn’t exist, or a corporate policy that is somehow alive.
- Make community out of the complaint: These shows become cultural meeting points: a way for people to say “yes, you too?” without sounding dramatic. That shared recognition is part of their appeal, and why so many of them become cult favorites.
Office Space (1999) is the definitive “workplace recognition” comedy: deadpan, exhausted, and perfectly calibrated to the slow psychic erosion of office life. One of its most famous artifacts – the red stapler – became so iconic that it helped drive real-world demand for red staplers, leading Swingline to release a red model after the 
film’s cult popularity grew. That’s the genre in a nutshell: the joke is a prop, the prop becomes a symbol, the symbol becomes a consumer product, and the consumer product becomes an office in-joke. The satire completes a loop.
Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) is the darker end of absurdist workplace comedy: a world where bureaucracy isn’t just inefficient, it is predatory, where forms, departments, regulations, and mechanical procedures all operate with an indifferent cruelty. Contemporary critics still note its prescience 40 years on as a satire of institutional dysfunction.
Severance (2022—) takes a familiar corporate environment and makes it alien by literalizing something many people already feel: that work requires you to become a different person. The show highlights the sinister side of workplace culture by exaggerating elements that already exist in real life. In other words: it’s science fiction that works because it’s emotionally accurate.
The 20 titles that follow, both films and TV series, span decades and styles, but they share a core belief: the workplace is one of the few places where adults are required to behave irrationally in a coordinated way, every day, and call it normal. Some entries in the list are bright and goofy. Others drift toward paranoia, horror, and dystopia. But they all treat employment as a stage for absurd theater that is sometimes hilarious, sometimes bleak, and often both in the same scene.
As always, we provide each entry with its hyperlinked EIDR ID so you’ll be able to dig deeper into each title’s metadata, production history, and related works. After all, in a properly managed workplace, even surrealism should be trackable.
