Office Hits

You sit at your desk for eight hours pretending to look busy, hitting refresh on your email, telling yourself the day will end eventually even though it absolutely won’t. The printer’s jammed again. Your boss asked for something due yesterday at 4:47 PM today. Someone left their lunch in the fridge and it’s been there for three weeks.

Circus HalliGalli—a German comedy show—did a whole thing called Office Hits, which is basically sketches about every specific nightmare of office work. The hosts are these guys named Joko and Klaas who throw absurd music and comedy bits at you for an hour, and one of the main sketches has Palina Rojinski doing a full Rihanna impersonation while she’s mentally destroying her incompetent boss. The sketch is simple: she’s just running through every idiotic thing a manager does while channeling pure Rihanna attitude.

There’s other stuff too. Problems at the Office Printer. Meeting Baby One More Time—which is exactly what it sounds like. Dumb Dumb Dumb Dumb for those days where your brain is just completely offline. It’s all obvious material, but that’s kind of the point. It’s not trying to be clever. It’s just naming the specific hell of your actual job.

The weird thing about office comedy is that it only works if you’ve lived through it. You need the printer trauma. You need the meetings where nothing happens but everyone acts like something might. You need the boss who doesn’t understand their own industry but definitely understands micromanaging. Once you’ve got all that, the sketches just feel like proof you’re not insane.

I don’t know if it actually helps you get through your day, listening to comedy about how much your day sucks while you’re still at your day. Maybe it just makes you more aware of the time passing. Maybe it’s just permission to hate it for a few minutes. But there’s something satisfying about someone else saying it out loud, saying all the things you’re not allowed to say to your actual boss.