SNL envisions a real nightmare co-worker: Chucky
This Saturday Night Live sketch portrays one HR meeting you might not survive
Aux News Chucky
This is a time when many people with established jobs are trying to renegotiate the amount of time they must show up to work each week. In many cases, the response to returning to the office has been, “For the love of God, no.” For the past two years, many Americans have loved avoiding a time-wasting commute, the workplace drama, and interpersonal conflicts that result from being forcibly shackled to a desk with a set group of people every day. Reluctance to rejoin that system is high.
This week, Saturday Night Live addressed this trend by taking the premise of a nightmare office to its ultimate extension. Ego Nwodim, Chloe Fineman, and Melissa Villaseñor are corporate co-workers seen in the restroom, gossiping about an annoying colleague: Janet. The worst thing about her? She’s so quiet. During carpool, she’ll disappear, then pop up out of the back seat like Chucky, the murderous doll from the horror series Child’s Play.
Guess who’s in the stall behind them? An eavesdropping Chucky (Sarah Sherman), who happens to be another one of their co-workers and takes offense at being equated to the office pariah. He terrorizes and threatens to kill the women right there, but their ultimate fate is worse: They all must participate in a corporate HR session to field his complaint.
“Chucky as coworker” is a solid premise on its own, but this sketch takes things to the next level: Sherman is an exceptional Chucky, Fineman’s character attributes Chucky’s eavesdropping to the company’s unsafe gender-neutral bathroom policy, and Jake Gyllenhaal (especially good as the company’s HR flunky) tells Chucky that the women were wrong to equate him to sucky Janet, and that he belongs at the company because “each of us has a different story,” even as the doll repeatedly stabs his leg. Meanwhile, Janet is in the corner taking notes (and eating overly fragrant food).
Real-life corporate nightmares aren’t too far apart. Who among us hasn’t felt like we’ve been repeatedly shanked in the leg at a meeting (or prayed for strength when dealing with a cubemate’s odiferous food choices)?
32 Comments
Even if you could see it coming a mile away, I still lost it when Gyllenhaal stated while you shouldn’t stab people, bullying was also wrong and nobody should be compared to Janet. Before telling Janet to shut up and keep taking notes.Even as predictable as everything was, the notes they hit were so effective.
But surely everyone was expecting Janet to come out of the bathroom stall, right? Especially after the comment about what a quiet lurker she is?
Oh, she was there too. She was just to busy eating tuna in her stall to come out and join the conversation.And don’t call me Shirley.
and just like that, that scene in Robocop popped into my head.
There was always respect…
That was uninspired and not particularly funny. Which is a shame, because when I saw this headline I was speedy with my excited click.They went about the joke in a sort of backward way, trying to make Chucky’s sociopathy carry the weight of the joke instead of leaning into how hurt he was/how terrible Janet is (eating tuna? meh, do better).
I think you might be missing out on the subtext that the *victims* in this scenario are the people Chucky is stabbing, and the prioritization of emotional comfort, in general, can act as validation for physical abuse.
Even poor Janet, who has done NOTHING TO HURT ANYONE ELSE, wouldn’t be a “victim” of bullying if her self-esteem could supercede other peoples’ opinions… and it’s ultimately her responsibility to make that happen. She even demonstrates stoicism by asking why she needs to be present at the meeting.
Obviously not everyone finds humor in the same places, but this is RIPPING HOT social commentary.
Is this the beginning of the end? People are more connected than ever with mobile devices, social media and remote conferences yet we’ve drifted further and further apart. It’s not all that surprising that people can’t stand physically being around other people and more often than not, when they are, their faces are buried in their phones, in parks, restaurants, even concerts.I don’t condone bullying of any kind but you can’t change human nature with HR meetings and seminars. We were born of competitive alpha-dog tribalism and pack mentality has never left the human collective. I think we’re just at the point now that we’ve stopped pretending that it doesn’t exist anymore.
Physically being around other people is kind of gross. They’re filled with organs and bones and stuff
And eyelash mites.
That’s why we need to replace workers with AI. Nothing but clean microchips! And maybe inadvertent racism due to poor training set choices.
—and poop!
HR exists to protect and serve the company, not the employees. They’re the bad guys. Michael Scott was right about Toby.
Tell me about it. Years back I worked in an office where the HR would privately flirt with me. (She had a Rita-Moreno, West-Side-Story 1962 look — and I ain’t no Tony). And though I liked the attention, I never felt I could drop my guard around her.
Its not thr end of anything. People are annoying. People also feel the need to complain about those annoyances because they want to vent. It’s not that serious. This also isn’t new.
Well, I know in the past if you had a complaint with HR, they’d listen to you but nothing would ever get done because the company didn’t want to offend the other parties involved or have to deal with employee shitstorms. At best, they’d just sweep it under the rug. At worst, the company would just fire the person with the complaint. Problem solved.
Now, they bend over backward for every little complaint to avoid Twitter bombs.
Thats not true we were not born to be competitive it is our terrible economic system that prioritizes competition over cooperation. You’ve just swallowed the bait
It doesn’t even have to apply to economics. Sports wouldn’t exist if we weren’t inherently competitive. Successful teams have way more fans than non because everyone loves a winner, the alpha. Most neighborhoods are still separated, not just by wealth but ethnicity, although wealth certainly plays into it.Politics, just look at Trump. He helped usher humanity’s baser instincts to the front. To remind us that we’re not as evolved as we’d like to think and there are many out there who are perfectly fine with this.That fact that we’re debating Will Smith’s slap at the Oscars and whether he should be punished or for how long in the middle of a war crisis between Russia and the Ukraine, amidst soaring gas and food prices shows how much we’re part of an easily manipulated collective.
Sports is a collaborative process…lay off the weed.
I’ll smoke whatever he’s having.
It’s not the end yet. Wait till we get more realistic VR sexual experiences, then the true end of human interaction will begin.
What’s more interesting to me are the people who seemingly don’t want lockdowns and restrictions to end, many of whom presumably because the last two years have allowed them to justify avoiding social contact. In general the pandemic has amped everyone’s existing eccentricities, whatever they are, to 11.
The sketch is tremendously lazy from a lot of standpoints—then again that’s a Melissa and Chloe showcase specialty. Also, of course the “awful” person is a heavy set woman named Janet (what the hell, how many people in the industry did I piss off somehow? I’m kidding… maybe) who people have petty gripes about but no real substantive claims as why they don’t like her. Then there’s the mishandling of the Chucky material. It’s painfully obvious no one who wrote the sketch has seen any of the movies or has any familiarity with the character to make the joke clever. It’s like reaching for fruit that’s hanging so low it’s already in the compost pile.
First of all, this nightmare should be fired into the sun and replaced with something that makes one single lick of sense:This is a time when many people with established jobs are trying to renegotiate relationships to an established physical office, the amount of time they must show up in a particular place each week. In many cases, the response has been, “For the love of God, no.”very day —> every dayits ultimate extension —> its ultimate conclusion (You take premises to conclusions. “Ultimate Extension” is a pill you get at the gas station) see in the restroom—> (seen?) in the restroomco-worker / coworker —> pick one Real-life corporate nightmares aren’t too far apart —> not what “far apart” means
hmmm…yeah I wonder if we can think of any employees who got shanked
The emperor has no clothes,This skit just plain wasn’t funny.
Dude. Michael. Please start adding your opinions into “reviews.” The fact that you’re doing a straight-up recap, every time I read you, tells me you don’t trust your audience.
This felt like a rip off of a Tictoc’rs skit of living and working with Jigsaw of Saw. Except the low budget original is far funnier the SNL version.
I’ve never seen SNL lean so into a performer’s unusual style as it has with Sherman. I’m not complaining, but I wonder if they would have let, say, Demitri Martin go into weird and conceptual skits? Or let Gallagher do prop comedy all the time? Letting Sherman go full bore on body horror is perhaps one of the weirdest, most welcome things SNL has done lately.
Do you think the real Chucky is miffed they didn’t ask him to play himself? Did something happen behind the scenes when he appeared on the show in 1998 and that’s why they won’t invite him back?
this sketch was awful. my mind boggles when i think of how many writers there are on this show, and yet they produce terrible shit like this. why can’t the writers truly make something funny?i’m glad we didn’t get another one of those 3-nerds-in-a-room sketch video, this week. again, terrible shit.