Satire is rich
Workplace satire is a rich playground of ideas. In modern memory, movies like the cinematic masterpiece Office Space (1999) still resonate with modern viewers--destroying office technology, the pressure of "Hawaiian Shirt Friday", forced camaraderie for every birthday, and feeling passed over for promotions; we laugh because scenes remind us all of experiences we have likely had, or wish we could have had, and if you don't laugh, you'll cry.
A particularly painful (read: relatable) example in Office Space is when the manager of a restaurant passive aggressively remarks that his wait-staff employee could do more than she currently is. After asking if she is, in fact, doing the minimum requirements (spoiler alert: she is), the employee is still "encouraged" to do more. Before the end of the film, he will pressure her again about her performance, leading her to quit.
The noble tradition of workplace comedies continues, with examples like 30 Rock and The Office. In both of these shows, however, even when the employees spend time in the throes of shenanigans, refusal is rarer. In fact, we believe that one of the most relatable parts of the shows is how frequently the employees, despite that hell they are put through, show up day after day, week after week.
Everyone knows what the joke is when Tammy Swanson of Parks and Recreation strips down in the center of the library, while her librarian colleague ignores her nakedness. Instead, the librarian cautions the group to be quiet saying "Shush, this is a library!" in the "Jammy" episode of Parks and Recreation (2015). While there is more to unpack in this single scene (including the fact that the librarian has chosen to take Tammy's side, her coworker, over that of a patron, perhaps suggesting the nefarious nature of librarians to only accept those who are already members of their own rank?). Even a naked woman's hysterical strip tease isn't enough to interfere with a librarian's duty to say "Shhhhh" and maintain the status quo above all else?
Parks and Recreation: Ron and Jammy (American TV Series). Season 7, Episode 2. Jan 13, 2015.
Whether you dress it in a letterman's jacket or slip it into a co-ed's overtight t-shirt, the bucolic setting of a campus makes a great stage for dark comedies, as well as for satirical and dystopian futures. These speculative stories can go well beyond the question of "what are we laughing about when we laugh about librarians?" but sometimes they start with that question. In The Big U by Neal Stephenson there's what amounts to a civil war on campus but things start out small when a bunch of protestors steal the library card catalogue and try to ransom it back (1984). They mail in card a week to the library along with a ransom note promising to return the rest of the contents of the card catalogue. Their demands start with (1) "S.S. Krupp and the Trustees must be purged" and (2) that "The university must have open admissions and no room, board or tuition fees", but things don't go as planned for a number of reasons:
Similarly, Kurt Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus uses the college campus as a setting for crisis, rebellion, and an exploration of dystopian futures (1990). Hocus Pocus is arguably Vonnegut's darkest and most troubling book. In it, Eugene Debs Hartke, a professor fired for sleeping with the University president's wife, writes a memoir in the college library one line at a time. The college has become a prison and he writes on scraps of paper and pages torn from books. Debs, has killed and sexually exploited a large number of people and in his memoirs discovers he has done so in disturbingly equal numbers. He also has the dubious distinction of being responsible for more deaths than any of Vonnegut's other characters."During the previous five years, a sweatshop of catalogers had begun to transfer the catalog into a computer system, and the Administration hoped that ten percent of the catalog could be salvaged in this way. Instead they found that a terrible computer malfunction had munched through the catalog recently, erasing call numbers and main entries and replacing them with knock-knock jokes, Burma-Shave ditties and tracts on the sexual characteristics of the Computing Center senior Staff . . . [and] S.S. Krupp observed that card catalogs, a recent invention, had not existed at the Library of Alexandria, and though he would have preferred, ceteris paribus, to have the catalog, we didn't have one now, that was too bad, and we were going to have to make do" (Stephenson 1984).
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