Comedian Aparna Nancherla On Corporate and Laughing at Her Own Anxiety
Entertainment
The office comedy Corporate can be bleak—so bleak that it sometimes circles around to relatable, as it follows two groggy-looking junior executives who fluctuate between being strung out and just shrugging off their terrible work conditions. The show follows a handful of employees at Hampton Deville, a soulless corporation that tends to exploit human tragedy for its own profit. (Its tagline is “We don’t make anything, we make everything.”) Whereas the quiet subtext of its predecessor The Office was that the work was boring and the workplace was antagonistic, Corporate lets that dynamic play out in a workplace that is patently evil. The characters’s fantasies—where they dream of praise or going home—are laid bare, and though the show can verge on chaotic, it’s hard to look away.
Comedian Aparna Nancherla (who previously wrote for Late Night with Seth Meyers and has been on Crashing, Bojack Horseman, and Netflix’s The Standups) plays Grace, a Human Resources employee. Grace is as no-nonsense about the workplace as she is about her desire to pick the pink Starbursts out of the candy bowl in the office kitchen or stay home on occasion to just read a book and masturbate. The character and the premise of Corporate are a natural fit for Nancherla, who has made a name for herself in the standup comedy world by joking baldly about her experiences with anxiety and depression.
There’s a beautiful quality to a lot of Nancherla’s jokes about what could otherwise be generally dark thoughts—she delivers them with such an affable disposition and so little judgement that they almost feel more like affirmations. Her humor is not self-deprecating as much as it confronts the fact that everyone else has gone through something similar once, that talking helps, and that, all things being equal, human existence can tend to be very embarrassing and dumb.
Nancherla spoke to Jezebel over the phone about the latest season of Corporate, the potential pitfalls of making anxiety your brand, and how she just started reading the Harry Potter series. Below is a lightly edited and condensed transcription of our conversation.
JEZEBEL: A lot of Corporate is about getting up and going to work every day at a place you hate and realizing the system doesn’t care about you. Have you ever had a really terrible office job?
APARNA NANCHERLA: I temped at a big studio when I was living in Los Angeles and still doing comedy at night. As a temp, you’re already like, half-invested—but I would see how everyone became these pawns under this big umbrella of people in charge that you never really saw. [There] were these kind of faceless entities that would occasionally give us information, or be like, “This big thing happened and now we all have to go to this meeting!” And there are like, cupcakes for some reason. It felt very impersonal.
I worked for a long time in D.C., where I started comedy, at a trade association magazine and it was kind of interesting because the magazine was about studying the workplace. It was kind of a meta job about how offices manage their employees and how can they do it better and how can they make people more motivated. So that was an odd job to have, to be like, ‘How do companies sort of teach… slash trick their employees into loving their jobs more?’ But I wouldn’t say I’ve ever had a job that was quite as nihilistic as the one on Corporate.
Right, the show is a super exaggerated version of that. But for me, the best parts are when the characters say something out loud that like, in real life, you would just think to yourself and not tell anyone and bury deep down.
I think in office environments, there’s this kind of facade of smiley-ness and productivity that masks any problems or issues people are having. And Corporate plays with that, with the things you would never actually be allowed to say at work.
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