Obliquely Obfuscated Occupation
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"BHDR Industries, they're the top makers of that product that has something to do with our company!"
—Jen, The IT Crowd
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Lily: "Barney, what do you do?" |
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A classic sitcom trope where a character (or an entire company, in some examples) has an occupation but no details are ever revealed to the audience, or occasionally to any other characters. Usually played for laughs as their job can contain as many Noodle Incident events as possible, or the character will expect all others to know what he does and be disappointed when nobody can name it. For the character example, this trope is not to be confused with Pointy-Haired Boss; this character is generally competent, just nobody knows what their position is.
Examples of Obliquely Obfuscated Occupation include:
Literature
- Played for Drama in The Boy in The Striped Pajamas, where Bruno's father hides his occupation from his son, since he take orders directly from "The Fury". It's pretty obvious to the audience what Dad does, though.
Live Action Television
- The Smoking Room Justified: the series lasts two seasons where the camera never leaves the smoking room, and the characters have all agreed to never talk shop in there, so the audience never finds out what the company does.
- As well, mainish character Robin also spends the entire show in the smoking room, so while all the other characters have specific roles, his is never touched on.
- The IT Crowd plays it straight for the most part, but lampshades it occasionally (see page quote).
- How I Met Your Mother has Barney, who answers every question about his job with a dismissive laugh and a "please."
- Black Books lampshades and inverts when Fran gets and loses a new job in the space of a week or so, all without ever knowing what she was meant to be doing.
- Friends: Chandler's generic, white-collar job is set up as a trivia question, but nobody can answer what he does. It's "statistical analysis and data reconfiguration."
- In the Fred Savage sitcom Working, it was never mentioned what the corporation did.
- A running joke on Martin with Tommy. To the extent that multiple episodes were dedicated to trying to find out what his job was.
- Kramer on Seinfeld appears by all accounts to be unemployed, but is never hurting for money. When Jerry asks him what it is he actually does, he simply answers "Oh, I get by."
Newspaper Comics
- Lampshaded in My Cage, where Norm does some kind of work for a company called MacGuffin Inc, whose purpose is unknown.
- Dilbert. The title character is an engineer (along with most of the rest of the cast), and there are references to creating software, but that's about as much details as you're going to get.
Web Comics
- No one really knows what IDs does.
Western Animation
- On The Flintstones, Barney's occupation - aside from ocassional single episode jobs he and Fred get together - is never clarified. It became a running joke, such that in one episode, when Wilma and Betty are trying to impress someone by lying about how prosperous their families are, Wilma claims Fred is "in the construction business" while Betty claims Barney is in "top secret work."