“Like A Boss” is a term almost exclusively used by the most annoying person you know as a not-actually-ironic way of bragging and endless memes riffing on it have pulverised it into oblivion… but the song that spawned its explosion in the culture is still one of the funniest fucking things I’ve ever seen. It helps enormously that it has a solid satirical point – middle managers in boring jobs who try and inflate their sense of importance by tapping into the idea of being boss. It’s almost a poignant story of ‘The Bowss*’ flailing around in his daily life trying to grab onto anything that him feel cool – not just hyping himself up, but in being an overly micromanaging manager. In this context, I enjoy how the song is built around hip-hop as well; obviously, this is a reflection of Lonely Island’s actual, sincere interest in hip-hop, but I like how it also reflects the way well-off white people get a real kick out of imitating the tropes of urban black poverty – mainly, I think, because the empowering feeling of the genre makes them feel better about crappy boring lonely jobs like this.
*I don’t think there’s any way to accurately transcribe how Andy Samberg pronounces ‘boss’.
Of course, it then escalates this concept into ridiculous absurdity brilliantly. The simple repetition of the song helps enormously here; it makes the shift from banal douchebaggery to minor crime to violent crime to self-mutilation to surreal imagery feel strangely logical. A lot of SNL skits and some Lonely Island songs try to do what the Monty Python crew called ‘dropping the cow’, where in lieu of a punchline, the writers will just throw in an unrelated absurdity, and when it’s done badly, it doesn’t really feel like it brings closure to the joke (“People Getting Punched Right Before Eating” has this problem). “Like A Boss” happens so fast and so weirdly rationally that I barely have time to register it, so that when we finally hit the wall at the end, all I have time to do is laugh. It helps that Seth Rogen brilliantly brings us back to reality (he finds the funniest possible way to incredulously ask “You chop your balls off and die?”). No amount of #likeaboss hashtags can ruin that.
What are some of your favourite lines or scenes that have been quoted into oblivion but still make you laugh?
