Professional Self-Importance Satire
Working Through Christmas: Wanker’s Guide
The Daily Mash’s “wanker’s guide to ensuring everyone knows you’re working through Christmas” perfectly captures that specific type of insufferable colleague who treats working during holidays as personal martyrdom requiring constant announcement. The satire identifies behaviour everyone’s witnessed but nobody directly confronts. That’s comedy’s social utility: naming recognisable arseholery without causing workplace conflict.
Professional Self-Importance as Comedy
People who perform busyness rather than simply being busy are comedy gold. They send emails at midnight, post LinkedIn updates about “grinding,” constantly reference their workload. The Daily Mash satirises this by providing actual guide to the behaviour. Making implicit performance explicit destroys its power. Once you’ve named it, the behaviour becomes self-parody. That’s satire’s transformative function: rendering ridiculous what seemed serious.
Christmas and Work Culture
The expectation that everyone values Christmas equally ignores cultural, religious, and personal diversity. But people working through holidays specifically to demonstrate commitment rather than necessity deserve mockery. The satire distinguishes between genuine work requirements and performative workaholism. That distinction matters. Some people actually need to work; some people just need you to know they’re working. Understanding that difference makes better comedy and better colleagues. More workplace satire appears on bohiney.com.