assclown

‘Office Space’ Turns 20: How Mike Judge Brought Flair, Assclowns and Red Staplers to the World

Mike Judge’s workplace satire “Office Space,” which celebrates its 20th anniversary Feb. 19, was a bona fide box office flop when it grossed a measly $10.8 million in 1999. But once the comedy was discovered on DVD and cable, “Office Space” became a cult sensation, spreading concepts like “flair” and “assclown” across pop culture.

The now-classic comedy will be celebrated at the upcoming Texas Film Awards, where it will be inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame. Judge and the cast will reunite for a screening and panel March 7 in Austin.

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Servers at T.G.I. Friday’s might want to raise a glass to “Office Space,” because according to a 2004 New York Magazine interview with Judge, the restaurant not only got rid of its dorky striped shirts but also the mandatory flurry of pins and buttons — known as “flair” — a few years after the film was released.

It was all because of the criticism Jennifer Aniston’s character, Joanna, suffered as a waitress at Friday’s-esque restaurant Chotchkie’s, for not wearing enough pieces of flair.

“We need to talk about your flair,” says her boss, played by Judge. “Fifteen is the minimum, okay?”

“About four years after ‘Office Space’ came out, T.G. I. Friday’s got rid of all that flair, because people would come in and make cracks about it,” he told the magazine. “So, maybe I made the world a better place.”

“Office Space,” which marked the live-action directorial debut of Judge, best known at the time for the animated TV series “Beavis and Butt-Head” and “King of the Hill,” revolves around everyman Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston), who works as a programmer at a company called Initech where he hates his job and is constantly bothered by his odious boss Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole).

His best friends at work are his fellow programmers Samir (Ajay Naidu) and Michael Bolton (David Herman), who live in fear that they will be fired.

Peter’s life changes when his girlfriend takes him to an occupational hypnotherapy session. When the therapist dies while Peter is still hypnotized, he wakes up the next morning carefree and relaxed. He breaks up with his girlfriend and begins dating Joanna. And instead of getting in trouble with his new laid-back attitude at work, his bosses love his newfound perception.

When Peter discovers that his friends will be fired, the three hack the company’s computer accounting system, diverting small monies into their account. But, of course, it doesn’t turn out quite the way they expected.

“Office Space” was based on the “Milton” animated shorts Judge created and voiced in the early 1990s, as well as his own experiences working as an engineer — which years later, also made Judge’s “Silicon Valley” feel painfully real.

“The main message of the movie is, you got to give yourself permission to do the things that make you happy even if it’s going to disappoint your employer,” explained Livingston, who is currently playing an executive who commits suicide in ABC’s “A Million Little Things.”

For the past 20 years, he noted, “People come and tell me that the movie changed their life. It’s like after seeing the movie, it gave them the confidence to get out of whatever it was they were doing that was making them miserable and move on to something else. I only hear from the people for whom that worked out, but hopefully there’s not too many that regret it.”

In an email interview, Judge said he gets the same reaction from fans. “I haven’t had anyone say they quit their job after watching the movie and wound up on welfare,” he added.

Livingston tries to downplay his role in the cult hit. “For me, the movie is about everybody else,” he said. “I kind of describe it as I’m the bus driver in the movie and the really interesting characters are the ones who get on and off the bus. I’m just there to kind of keep the bus moving forward along the route. “

Herman, who now works primarily as a voice actor, believes that Judge is a visionary. “You know at that time the fluorescent lights and the gray cubicle walls were groundbreaking,” he said. “Those office landscapes, those offices parks… You never saw anything like that. Now every 30 second commercial break you see at least two commercials like that. Every FedEx commercial… But that hasn’t watered down the impact of this movie. People still go ‘that’s my life. ‘”

Judge, he said, “really hit the target perfectly.” Though the film is set in Texas, “this really could be anywhere, America. It is in every way a classic comedy. “

In fact, Herman sees a lot of parallels between his character of Michael Bolton and the roles one of his favorite comic actors, W.C. Fields, essayed over 80 years ago.

Bolton, he said, “is a slave to his life, to this passive aggressive workplace. This life is without an endgame and yet he has to maintain being a man. That’s the struggle with W.C. Fields.”

Judge didn’t realize the impact the film would have. “I was just making a movie about the way it was when I worked those kinds of jobs,” he said. “If anything, I thought I was about ten years too late.” The absurdity of the workplace dynamic certainly carried over when Judge created the award-winning “Silicon Valley.”

Naidu found Judge to be a very hands-off director who let him and Herman have fun together. “There was a lot of improvisation, but there was a lot of ‘stick to the script’ too because the script was genius.”

Fans often bring up one of his favorite scenes, he says —  the one in which they are partying and dancing in Peter’s apartment after they install the virus. “I breakdance in that scene and that just happened because Mike said, ‘Guys, you have the space.’ And I did it. It stayed in the movie.

“I really get Mike’s tone,” said Herman, who knew Judge from doing voicework for “King of the Hill.”

“The script was great but there’s a lot of stuff shoehorned in there left and right that we did. At some point, there were hints that people were hoping for a PG-13 rating. I was kind of like ‘what would be the purpose of that?’ You have to be thrown through the system to some degree to get the laughs. So, I would stuff as many blue things as I possibly could between things just so that was never going to be a possibility.”

Speaking of blue, it was Herman who came up with the word assclown to describe the real Michael Bolton, the bland pop singer his character can’t stand.

“I never met him,” said Herman. “I always heard from Mike his reaction was something like a groan when the movie is brought up. I used to say I feel both Michael Boltons have suffered enough. At the time the movie came out he took himself real seriously. Real seriously. So, for an office peon like me to be taking him down felt like a big feat. That is what was cool about it.”

In a meta turn, the real Bolton has now embraced the movie. “There’s an entire version of him doing all the scenes,” said Herman. “You can go on the internet and you can find him doing ‘Office Space.’”

In another “Office Space” effect, office workers and fans can now buy red Swingline staplers, which didn’t exist before the movie was made. In the film, the weird bespectacled office worker Milton (Stephen Root) guards his red stapler as if it was his treasured security blanket.

When it started getting popular in 2000, Swingline began getting calls about the stapler. But the company didn’t sell a red stapler — a prop designer had painted it red for the film. The company soon remedied that with its “Rio Red” stapler. And Yahoo News just reported that for the film’s 20th anniversary, the company is selling an official “Milton’s Swingline Red Stapler” edition.

So why didn’t the subversive comedy catch on in 1998?

Judge believes “Office Space” bombed because “it was a hard movie to make a trailer for — hard to market in general,” he said. “And the trailer wasn’t great. I mean, it was a weird movie at the time.”

He began to notice the tide changing when he overheard people talking about it at a Blockbuster in Austin. “Then I started hearing from the actors that they were getting recognized a lot. It was a slow build. Then around 2003, Fox wanted to do a sequel. If someone had told me that was going to happen on opening weekend in 1999, I would’ve thought they were just making fun of me.”

Could a sequel ever happen after all this time? Never say never.

Back around the film’s 10th anniversary, Judge told Film School Rejects he wouldn’t do it “unless we had a good idea — but you never know.”

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Is your coworker an assclown or an asshat? Linguists explain the difference

Look at that guy over there at work. Listen to him. He is the worst. The worst. “Jerk” feels too soft for someone this aggressively foolish; “asshole” feels too grand, somehow, for someone this blundering.

So: Is he an asshat? Or is he an assclown?

Those two delightfully descriptive terms are among the 1,400 words, phrases, and meanings added to the Oxford English Dictionary in its most recent quarterly revision. The most thorough record of the English language offers the exact same definition for both nouns: “a stupid or contemptible person.”

But are these two epithets truly interchangeable? For those who like to be as precise as possible when muttering sotto voce complaints about their coworkers, are there subtle variations in behavior that distinguish an assclown from an asshat?

Linguists say yes. But first, some history.

Asshat

Asshead has been with us as an insult since at least 1541, when English cleric Thomas Becon lamented how “little pleasure have these asse heades in hearing the glorious & blessed word of god.” Asshat, in contrast, dates only to the earliest days of the 21st century. The OED identifies the Jan. 4, 2002, Usenet post “You’re an asshat too” as the word’s first known inscription in written English, making the newsgroup rec.sport.paintball sort of like asshat’s own Chauvet Cave.

From the primordial soup of Usenet, asshat crawled ashore and intermingled with the cultural lexicon, evolving into a casual but descriptive term of an unlikeable person. In the word’s official entry in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, lexicographers theorized that it could be a play on the phrase to “have one’s head up one’s ass,” an insult which, if pictured literally, would indeed result in the person’s ass serving as a sort of hat. However, the author concluded, “a more precise history will depend on the location of further attestations.”

Assclown

Whereas asshat seeped slowly into the culture, assclown sprung fully formed, Minerva-like, from the brain of writer and director Mike Judge. The word’s first documented appearance in the English language is at the 0:33 mark in this scene in Judge’s 1999 film Office Space:

An assclown, wrote etymologist John Kelly in the blog Strong Language, “is a pejorative pie thrown especially in the face of someone who, wrongly, thinks their actions are clever, funny, or worthwhile.” Examples of persons named as assclowns in the popular press include art vandals, Anonymous, and selfie-stick wielders.

As with an asshat, an assclown’s identity derives largely from the dissonance between the person’s regard for himself and the regard in which others hold him. But how to draw a line between the two? Name developer and brand consultant Nancy Friedman, who has written about asshats for Strong Language, says that of the two, an asshat “is more of an asshole and less of a joker” than his cousin the assclown.

Others disagreed. “I see assclown as an appropriate putdown not just for a run-of-the-mill jerk, but someone who revels in the performance of being a jerk,” said linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer. “Asshat is a bit milder and not so performative.”

Kelly tells Quartz at Work that he considers asshat an appropriate term for a person doing obnoxious things, while assclown is the correct label for a fundamentally obnoxious person. A hat is something you wear; a clown is something you are. “Hats can be taken on and off, at least in my mental imagery of the swears, while clown hits deeper at someone’s behavior or being,” Kelly told us via email.

Both terms derive their power from their associations with asshole, a word of singular force in English. “Asshole” was first used to describe an unpleasant person during World War II, explains Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Ascent of the A-word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years. From the beginning, it was an insult that punched up: US soldiers used it to describe an officer who believes his status “entitles him to a kind of behavior—to either abuse his men, or makes him more important than he really is,” Nunberg told NPR.

By the 1970s, the word had embedded itself in popular culture. It still carried the implicit accusation that the asshole in question was abusing whatever power he (or, less often, she) held, and failing to give others the basic respect and decency required by the social contract.

An asshole—or an assclown, or an asshat—is someone who doesn’t care, by reason of ignorance or malice, if his conduct demeans or offends another. It is about having a skewed relationship to entitlement, something that can become glaringly apparent in the confines of the workplace.

So, that guy: Is he an asshat or an assclown? You should use whichever term feels most satisfying in its utterance, safe in the knowledge that when historians unearth your furious tweets and texts and office-chat DMs centuries from now, the OED will be able to tell them exactly what you meant.

Colby Covington offers theory about 'assclown' Jon Jones' restaurant phobia

By: Blue Corner | September 28, 2018 9:30 pm Follow @MMAjunkie

Gallery Photos: Best of Jon Jones

Former UFC light heavyweight champion Jon Jones recently wrapped up his more than year-long ordeal with the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.

He hasn’t been booked for his comeback fight just yet. But Jones’ coach Mike Winkeljohn told Australia’s Submission Radio that his fighter suffers from a fear of dining out at restaurants … because someone might spike his food, leading to another positive test.

“Jon’s even scared to eat out – he’s scared to be anywhere,” Winkeljohn said. “He’s like, ‘Gosh, what if that waiter doesn’t like me? The bus boy doesn’t like me?’ You know? Who knows what’s going to happen out there. And it is kind of scary that way if you think about it.”

For starters, we find it pretty hard to believe Jones said “Gosh.” But getting past that, this is a pretty high level of paranoia. And former UFC interim welterweight champion Colby Covington seized on it.

Covington took a swipe at Jones on Twitter tonight: “Yeah Jon. Applebee’s keeps steroids and cocaine on site to sprinkle in your soup de jour. You’re such a (expletive) assclown,” Covington wrote in response to the report about Jones’ restaurant phobia.

And while it’s pretty safe to say these guys aren’t likely to ever get booked for a fight – unless Covington eats out every meal at Applebee’s for the next year and orders those brew pub pretzels with beer cheese dip every time – at the very least maybe we have a new social media rivalry to look forward to.

Gallery Photos: Best of Colby Covington

For more on the UFC’s upcoming schedule, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.

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