Workaholics

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"How are we supposed to find someone to give us clean piss when everyone over the age of 12 smokes weed these days?"
—Adam in the pilot.
(left to right) Adam, Anders, and Blake.

Comedy Central Work Com following the exploits of three college graduate Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonists Adam, Anders, and Blake. The three all work at a telemarketing company, but they spend most of their time getting drunk, doing drugs, and pulling pranks.

The show was based on the Web Show 5thyear and is generally described as a sort of Spiritual Successor to Office Space, but on drugs. It premiered on Comedy Central on April 6, 2011, to a mixed-to-positive critical response.

Not to be confused with a Workaholic, which this show's main characters definitely aren't.

Tropes used in Workaholics include:

Alice: I'm gonna eat your balls for breakfast tomorrow, with my Grape Nuts. Then I'm gonna murder you. Then I'm gonna fire you.

  • Bad Boss: Alice regularly insults her employees both passively and outright.
  • Brick Joke: A few.
    • In "Straight Up Juggahos", the boys scheme to set Jillian up on a blind date with a man they found online, telling her he is a friend named Jake Heisenripbauer (a name they made up on the spot). At the very end of the episode, Jillian calls him by the said name, leaving us to assume that she's been calling him that the entire time and that she still doesn't know his real name.
    • "Model Kombat" has Blake meeting a sports shop owner who lost nearly all his sight during the war when a piece of shrapnel hit him, but Blake mistakes his words for "pizza shrapnel." Later in the episode, Adam throws a pizza slice at Ders. Blake immediately yells at him, asking if they have any idea how many people go blind due to pizza shrapnel.
    • In the cold open of "In the Line of Getting Fired", Adam says that he'd be willing to give head to a man for $900 (which he immediately recants). During the closing scene, Blake is being put into an ambulance after being shot and asks how much it will cost him since he doesn't have insurance. The paramedic says $900. Blake and Ders then tell Adam to put his money where his mouth is.
  • Butt Monkey: Waymond.
  • Catch Phrase: "Tight butthole/loose butthole" definitely comes to mind.
    • Blake and calling people "dumb idiots."
  • Cloudcuckoolander: Blake and Adam's drug dealer and friend, Karl.
  • The Danza: The three main characters are all named after their respective actors. Also, Jillian.
  • Deadpan Snarker: The boys' boss, Alice.
  • Don't Explain the Joke: When the boys pull a "Poop Dollar" prank on someone (they wrap a dollar around poop and then leave it on the ground for someone to pick up or step on), one of them shouts "See we poop in the dollar!" as the victim runs away. When it happens again, they all yell "POOP DOLLAR" as they drive away.
  • Dude Looks Like a Lady: Blake was confused for Anders' wife by an older employee in "The Strike".
  • Fan Service: Blake's striptease at the beginning of "Checkpoint Gnarly." Really, in any given episode there's a pretty good chance Blake will end up at least a little naked.
  • In-Series Nickname: "Ders." Anders is hardly ever called by his full name.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Alice is indeed a verbally abusive Bad Boss, and in the episode "Model Kombat" she outright tells Adam that she wouldn't care if he died. Later that episode, she doesn't hesitate to save him from choking to death, and afterwards she even grudgingly lets him hug her for a second.
  • Last-Name Basis: Montez.
    • Actually, "Montez" is his first name. His full name is "Montez Walker" as we learned in "We Be Ballin", the episode his character was introduced in.
  • No Sense of Personal Space: The drug tester gets reeeeally close to Adam when he's peeing into a cup.
  • Only Sane Man: Anders, to some extent. He also seems to take his job a bit more seriously than Adam and Blake, and doesn't seem to take drugs as much. But he still does them.
  • Pretty in Mink: Blake's bear jacket. "BITCH BETTA HAVE MY HONEY !"
  • Reasonable Authority Figure: Surprisingly, Alice, who has retained her staff (even Anders, Adam, and Blake) despite numerous emails from Corporate telling her to trim the dead weight.
  • Recut: The boys watch an edited for TV version of Die Hard with Blake's drug dealer and note the amusing replacement of "fuck" with "cluck."
  • Shout-Out: A drug tester in The Pilot calls Blake "Strawberry Shortcake".
  • Shown Their Work: It's unknown if there are any actual Insane Clown Posse fans on the production staff, but they go surprisingly in-depth into the Juggalo subculture for the episode "Straight Up Juggahos", right down to having one of the Juggalettes dub Adam "Sugar Bear" (the name of Shaggy 2 Dope's character in Big Money Hustlas) in one scene. Sure, they spend most of the episode mocking Juggalos, but at least they got the details right.
  • The Slacker: Blake, Adam, (and Anders to a lesser extent).
  • Spiritual Successor: Some reviewers describe it as this to Office Space.
  • The Stoner: Though all three of the guys do drugs, Blake is the Most Triumphant Example of this trope.
    • In The Pilot, a list of over a dozen drugs that are regularly in Blake's system are read aloud; among them include marijuana, cocaine, meth, and both Dayquil and Nyquil ("Why would anyone take both?")
    • Not to mention apparently birth control? Since it was also found in all the samples this is what we are led to believe...
  • Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: The three main characters are basically the annoying frat boys that come to your party uninvited, get really drunk, and fuck up your couch.
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