25 years Later, Office Space Remains So Funny it Hurts

If you’ve ever had the misfortune to work a corporate job, Office Space plays less like a comedy than a horrifying documentary. Upon its release 25 years ago, writer-director Mike Judge’s debut, live-action feature film came and went from movie theaters (it grossed just $12 million, against its modest $10 million budget). But it found a second life as a cult classic on home video, cable and, eventually, a thicket of memes.

Why has Office Space continued to resonate for the last quarter century? Probably because Judge, who attended the University of Texas at Dallas for a spell in the early 1990s before moving to Austin, is nothing short of a societal sage (go watch his 2006 film Idiocracy if you don’t believe us), a comic mind who foresaw so much of the soul-deadening years to come.

It’s also ripped directly from Judge’s experience, as he told The New York Times in 2017.

“For so long,” Judge told the Times, “I was wondering how I was going to make a living that wasn’t going to make me miserable. That was my main concern in life.”

Here are 25 reasons why Office Space holds up — and grows more hilarious (or depressingly relevant, depending upon your perspective) by the day — 25 years on:

1. Corporate culture’s stranglehold on America: The cubicle farms of Initech, where the main characters of Office Space work, are a gray-tinged vision of hell. Anyone who’s spent a day inside a corporate office likely gets a little twitchy watching the office-set scenes.

2. Quiet quitting: Long before the idea of “quiet quitting” became a topic of discussion, there’s evidence that Ron Livingston’s character, Peter, is a pioneer in the art of showing up, but checking out once he’s clocked in.

3. The soullessness of corporate culture: While it isn’t explicitly telegraphed, there are multiple instances throughout the film of the company forcing its employees into metaphorical straitjackets (hello, cover sheets on TPS reports!), which has only intensified since cult-of-personality tech companies began sprouting like weeds.

4. North Texas Traffic: Some of Office Space was filmed in and around North Texas, and the film’s opening traffic jam sequence, which deftly introduces the main characters as they navigate another car-choked commute, will induce chills in anyone who’s logged endless hours stuck on an off-ramp.

5. Self-taught experts: Throughout the film, the characters Samir and Michael Bolton make assertions that aren’t always backed up by facts. Such an approach is familiar to anyone who’s argued with a relative on Facebook.

6. Online fraud: The key plot point involves some petty digital theft, of the sort that was a bit more novel in the late 1990s. Now, such electronic shenanigans are commonplace.

7. Personal injury lawyers: Late in the film, the character Tom Smykowski, having just suffered a catastrophic car accident that’s left him wheelchair-bound, invites his co-workers over to his home. Rather than being downbeat about his ailments, Tom is giddy that his personal injury lawyer has arranged a huge payday that will fund his hobbies (like the side-splitting “Jump to Conclusions” mat).

8. Oversharing: The character of Drew (whose memorable scene involves his “O-face”) is emblematic of those who fill offices and insist upon sharing every detail of their lives — in an age of social media omnipresence, such oversharing has only intensified.

9. Selfish behavior: Another character trait that’s only gotten more pronounced in the years since Office Space debuted is the intensity of selfish behavior. The character Milton famously wants his red stapler returned, but he’s ignored until he just goes ahead and burns down the entire building in retribution.

10. Insufferable bosses: Insecure, micro-managing bosses are a pox upon offices, but the rise in technology enabling said scourges to track every detail of your daily work life means people like the character Lumbergh were a Hollywood fantasy come true.

11. The soul-sucking nature of jobs you hate: Office Space endures in part because, now as ever, work you don’t really want to do just sucks. As the gig economy has risen in prominence, that realization has been driven home more deeply.

12. The value of doing what you love: One of the subplots in Office Space revolves around Peter’s neighbor, Lawrence, who works in construction (he helped build the new McDonald’s in Las Colinas), and seems utterly unbothered by life. Being gainfully employed but not miserable ends up being the climactic revelation of the movie.

13. The maddening blandness of restaurant chains: Ah, Chotchkie’s and its “pieces of flair.” The aggressive sameness of chain restaurants is as much a target as the suffocating mundanity of office parks in the film. Particularly in an area like North Texas, choked as it is with strip malls, this element feels very close to the bone.

14. Frustration with technology: The scene of the main characters violently dismembering a malfunctioning printer is one of Office Space’s best-known. In the years since, technology has only infiltrated more of our lives. Who hasn’t wanted to take a bat to a smartphone or tablet occasionally?

15. Memeification: The concept of “memes” (and, for that matter, “going viral”) wasn’t a thing when the film was released in 1999, but in the decades since, the film has proved a gold mine for those needing a quick visual snippet to illustrate a point. Millenials (and up) still quote the movie on a monthly basis.

16. It’s inspirational — kind of: Never let it be said Office Space isn’t instructional. In 2023, a software engineer in Seattle was arrested for implementing a scheme very similar to the one in the film — only his office didn’t burn down and destroy all the evidence.

17. It made TGI Friday’s discontinue “pieces of flair”: One of the most memorable sequences involves a TGI Friday’s-adjacent eatery and its obnoxious insistence on forced fun. So cutting was this bit of satire that Judge revealed in 2014 to Deadline the film drove the chain to discontinue the practice.

18. Michael Bolton: Well before SNL band The Lonely Island discovered pop star Michael Bolton had a sense of humor, Judge and his collaborators were having fun at his expense. Over the ensuing years, Bolton even came around and enjoyed cracking some Office Space-related jokes.

19. Existential horror: While Office Space is indeed very funny on its face, there’s also the sense of pervasive dread under each scene, a sense of laughing to keep from crying. Long before A24 threaded this needle and made a cottage industry out of making it cool to cringe while you cackle, Office Space paved the way.

20. WFH: All these years later, you can’t help watching Office Space and thinking, “The company could’ve avoided a lot of this if they’d just let them work from home.”

21. Improv: Improv comedy was far more fringe in the 1990s than it is today, but many of Office Space’s most memorable lines and sequences grew out of the cast’s ability to play around and try things out. You don’t get the unhinged brilliance of, say, Anchorman without Office Space.

22. Its influence: Judge himself would return to the workplace well with his HBO series Silicon Valley, which skewered tech culture as much as it did office life. Even his 2006 film Idiocracy, which focuses a broader lens on America, owes a debt to the insights he gathered here.

23. Anticipating the rise of hip-hop: The gangsta rap-driven soundtrack was a striking juxtaposition in the late 1990s, but Judge cannily understood how the characters were enjoying bravado by proxy, even as the genre was taking hold of popular culture. What was once an outlier now resides firmly at the center of attention.

24. Mental health: Although unspoken, the notion of paying attention to your mental health is a key piece of Office Space’s overall message. The main character Peter seems far more relaxed and attentive once he disengages from his day job — a step too far for most, probably, but still a reminder that, at the end of the day, a job is just a job.

25. The pervasiveness of “Friends”: Of course, Jennifer Aniston was the star enlisted to help drive attention to the film at the time of its release, and she more than holds her own, displaying a go-for-broke attitude that wasn’t immediately apparent watching her on the mega-popular NBC sitcom. In years since, she’s become a trusted comedic talent for such collaborators as Adam Sandler and Charlie Day.