The Cast Of Comedy Central’s ‘Corporate’ On Their Worst Jobs & Finding Humor In The 9-To-5

Everyone’s experienced the soul-crushing indignity of a terrible job. I’ve worked at amusement parks, sold balloons, and my first job in entertainment was telling New Yorkers they weren’t allowed to walk down a public street during the filming of Will Smith’s I Am Legend. Guess what? The denizens of the Big Apple weren’t super jazzed about a 23-year-old from Get-The-Hell-Outta-My-Way, USA telling them what to do. The feeling of detached apathy towards an underwhelming job is universal, and no show captures the spirit of that futility with more humor and demented aplomb than Comedy Central’s exceptional new comedy Corporate.

Premiering tonight, Corporate is an edgy look at the day-to-day life at a soulless multi-national corporation. The fresh new series from the minds of Pat Bishop, Matt Ingebretson, and Jake Weisman emits a razor-sharp wit that skewers the monotony of adulthood in a fun, relatable manner. It’s a dark comedy, sure, but the show’s nihilistic outlook belies a plucky, subversive spirit that highlights the absurdity of the jobs we endure out of necessity.

“We tried not to pull any punches,” Corporate co-creator Matt Ingebretson told Decider when we met with the cast to chat about their new series, the first four episodes of which you can stream on CC.com. “The show is dark, and we wanted it to feel representative of what it’s like to work in places like this. But we also tried to make it as silly and as funny as possible.”

They say you should write what you know, and the cast of Corporate are certainly well-versed in the subject of frustrating employment. We spoke with Ingebretson, Jake Weisman, Aparna Nancherla, and Pat Bishop about their own personal, hilarious experiences with bad jobs.

Matt Ingebretson: (Co-creator/Actor)
Bad Job: Digital Marketing Associate 

“I have had so many bad jobs,” Matt explained over afternoon drinks at The Nomad Hotel in Midtown, New York. “The first four years of living in LA was just me getting a job and immediately trying to get out of that job because I hated it so much.” Little did Ingebretson know that the foundation for what would eventually become Corporate was partly influenced by one of these bad jobs, his six month stint as a digital marketing associate for an entertainment company.

“I was my boss’s only employee, so she spent all of her time just monitoring what I did, and all I had to do was post on social media and do analytics reports,” Matt said. “But it became this harrowing psychological experiment on me where anytime I turned in anything — like I would click send on an email — the phone would ring within seconds and she would already have a critique ready of what I had done. It got to the point where I would turn in something, like a presentation that had the wrong font, and she’d call me into her office and ask me why I had used the wrong font, which is a very difficult question to answer. At one point, we went back and forth. She was asking me why I had done this — for 30 minutes she was just grilling me — and I eventually had to tell her, ‘Celeste, you’re hurting my feelings right now.’ It was one of those jobs where anytime the phone rang, I felt like a PTSD response.”

Added Matt, “They were right to critique me. I just didn’t give a shit about my job at all.”

Aparna Nancherla (Actress)
Bad Job: Knife Saleswoman  

Aparna Nancherla is one of the funniest stand-up comedians you will ever see. An accomplished writer whose credits include Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell and Late Night with Seth Meyers, Aparna effortlessly transitions to an on-camera role in Corporate as she portrays beleaguered Human Resources rep Grace. Before embarking on a career in comedy, Nancherla’s first attempt at gainful employment came between her senior year of high school and freshman year of college when she attempted to enter the high-stakes world of door-to-door knife sales.

“It was like a typical scam ad,” Aparna remarked, explaining how she found the job. “It was like, ‘Do you want to make hundreds of thousands of dollars for 2-3 hours of work?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah. Why is no one else answering this ad?’ You go to this seminar, and it’s very cult-like. They’re like, ‘Write down all your contacts and anyone you know who you could possibly go and give this demonstration to.’ And then they teach you how to do the knife demo, and the thing is, I was bad at every aspect of the job. I couldn’t even do the demo where you’re supposed to be like ‘It can even cut through rope!’ I couldn’t even do the rope. I had to get my dad’s colleague’s, who as a pity favor were like, ‘You can come do the demo.’ And you’re supposed to sell full sets, and I think I sold two individual knives total.”

Aparna’s burgeoning career in the knife game was over before it started.

“I actually just stopped showing up. They called me and they were like, ‘Hey we haven’t seen you at the workshop,’ and I just, like, pretended I died.”

Pat Bishop (Co-creator/Director)
Bad Job: Little League Baseball Umpire 

Anyone who’s ever attended a Little League game knows that shit gets very real very fast. This is a lesson Corporate co-creator Pat Bishop learned the hard way when, at the age of 14, he had the unenviable task of being a Little League umpire.

“I had spent my youth playing baseball and always thought the umps were bad, and I didn’t understand why they’d make the wrong call,” Bishop told Decider. “Then I became an umpire and I realized I was terrible at it, and so everyone got mad at me. There’s one play where a kid slid into third base and I was like, ‘Uhh… out?’ And both the kid, the runner, and the fielder looked at me, and I immediately knew I was wrong. But you can’t go back on it. It was the son of the coach who I called out, which was the wrong person to go against. There was just like a palpable negative energy.”

Jake Weisman (Co-creator/Actor)
Bad Jobs: Production Assistant on Clerks II, Chandelier Store Employee 

“All jobs are terrible unless you’re doing exactly what you wanna do,” Corporate co-creator and star Jake Weisman asserted when it was his turn to share a tale of vocational misery. Nobody knows the toll an unfulfilling job can have on optimism and aspiration better than Weisman, who was basically on his way to achieving Bad Job Bingo before Corporate. The comedian worked as a PA, a director’s assistant, and chandelier salesman before adding Comedy Central to his resume.

“I worked on Clerks II, which was a nightmare for a lot of reasons. One of the actors, who will remain nameless — but it was Jason Mewes — he just did a lot of drugs and trashed his hotel rooms. I won’t say it’s because [he’s] from New Jersey, but I think it is. He just destroyed his hotel room. My job as a PA was to constantly clean up that mess, so that was very frustrating. Working in production is a nightmare. I also worked on a TV show, and I was an assistant to a director. He was definitely in an unhappy marriage, and I don’t think he liked me. But one day, he had false teeth, and I knew that because he put the false teeth on my desk and told me to call a dentist. It was such a cool power move, and I felt like I was in a Coen brothers movie.”

Weisman also found himself in a bit of hot water during his years as a chandelier salesman.

“You have no motivation to be good [at your job] when working at a chandelier store,” Weisman said. “I created a sex blog where I photoshopped pictures of me having sex. It’s not actually pictures of me having sex; it’s nonsensical.”

“There was no pornography in it,” Matt interjected. “It would essentially be a photoshop of Jake’s head on a health textbook anatomy.”

“My boss’s wife had friended me on Facebook, and that’s why I got caught. I was posting them incessantly on Facebook when I should have been working, and I got in trouble for that. I’ve never done very well at any job except [Corporate].”

Corporate’s tagline states that “Misery loves a company,” which is true. Life is ridiculous, but what makes it bearable is knowing that all of us — rich, poor, famous, the person who makes your coffee, Dane Cook — are forced to endure weirdos, inane small talk, and various eye-roll-inducing calamities every single day. It’s oddly comforting to know that nobody’s immune to the anarchy. We’re all just hittin’ that snooze button and counting down the minutes until Friday. Corporate is an immensely entertaining, uniquely funny reminder of that universal irritation.

“The thing that bonds people more than anything is shared pain and sadness, and that is funny,” Weisman explained. “The fact that everyone can relate to problems. That’s kind of what the show is about. You’re not really supposed to complain, but we all hate everything, let’s just talk about it.”

Corporate premieres tonight at 10:00 on Comedy Central. The first four episodes are now streaming on CC.com and the Comedy Central app.

Where to stream Corporate