AVQ&A: What's the silliest job in pop culture?

Their absurdity connects them all.

By A.V. Club Staff | March 29, 2025 | 10:00am

Clockwise from top left: Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew McConaughey (Screenshot: Failure To Launch); Bernard White (Screenshot: Silicon Valley); Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Tony Hale (Screenshot: Veep); Ben Affleck in The Accountant (Image: Warner Bros.)

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AVQ&A: What's the silliest job in pop culture?

As A Working Man in David Ayer’s latest, Jason Statham holds down a construction job while also getting into the revenge business—two gigs that we can respect. But pop culture is littered with jobs that strain credulity or otherwise make you wonder what the hiring process was like. For every person trying to earn a living while also bringing down a human trafficking ring, you have at least three dopes making up an entourage [insert requisite “oh yeaaahh” here]. For this week’s AVQ&A, we asked our staff: What’s the silliest job in pop culture?

As always, we invite you to contribute your own responses in the comments—and send in some prompts of your own! If you have a pop culture question you’d like us and fellow readers to answer, please email it to [email protected].

Criminal accountancy

Even accountants for the criminal elite experience job creep. The idea of a single man who’s turned to when the dirty financial laundry of cartels, killers, and corrupt corporations needs doing already encourages deep suspension of disbelief. But Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck, operating under a plethora of math dork pseudonyms) can’t simply be a CPA (Criminal Person Accountant), who also does regular person accounting on the side to keep up appearances. He must also be an autistic supersoldier on top of his tax duties. He’s so good at math and so neurodivergent that he must kick ass. (In the trailer, when the father of an autistic boy asks, “Can our son lead a normal life?” he is met with the reply “Define normal,” as Wolff prepares to go amortize someone’s mortality.) And let’s not even get into the shady, hardbitten pasts of…the Treasury Department bureaucrat and data analyst who are on the hunt for him. The Accountant is a goofy exploitation movie, but goofier still because of a foundation built equally upon deductions, depreciation, and bone-breaking pencak silat. [Jacob Oller]

Spiritual advisor to a soulless tech oligarch

There’s nothing inherently silly about the role of a spiritual advisor, but there are few endeavors as pointless as trying to help a tech mogul get in touch with his rapidly vanishing (if it ever existed) humanity. To his credit, Silicon Valley‘s Denpok (Bernard White) seemed self-aware enough to realize that guiding Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) toward enlightenment would be fruitless, instead choosing to ride the (vegan) gravy train for as long as possible. And he got to call Gavin “Smellson” to his face, albeit under the pretense of quoting someone else‘s disparaging remarks about the Hooli boss. But even if you call it a fun twist on the yes-man, anyone willing to couch sycophancy in Zen koans is the definition of an unserious person. [Danette Chavez]

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All-purpose science person

Take it from someone who crapped out of grad school after two years in a neuroscience lab: Scientists are smart folk—when they’re operating in their fields of expertise. Outside those narrow lanes of specialization, though, things can get a little dicier, which is part of why I can’t help but laugh any time I’m watching TV and an all-purpose “science person” is there to handle any problems that might conceivably involve wearing a lab coat. Although you can trace this “job” back to Mr. Spock on Star Trek and The Professor on Gilligan’s Island (and beyond), it truly came to flower in the era of the TV procedural. After all, it’s way easier (and more cost-effective) to have one cast member who can handle all your lab-based exposition, rather than bring in a series of experts (and their day rates) to deliver lines about individual disciplines. Much simpler to just create a character like NCIS‘s Abby Sciuto (Pauley Paurrette), who’s essentially a one-woman forensics van, handling any and all DNA analysis, blood spatter, ballistics, hacking tasks, etc.—you know, smart people stuff! [William Hughes]

Teenage fence

“Step into my office,” a constant refrain from teen hustlers looking to sell their wares in the most private spaces: the bathroom. The bathroom is the domain of the Teen Fence, the Eaglebaurers, Fonzarellies, and Damones, who smuggle illicit goods from the outside world into an unsuspecting school. These enterprising adolescent entrepreneurs are teenage bookies, test-answer dealers, matchmakers, and hall pass forgers, providing a service to students and stashing away a nice little profit for themselves. They get their classmates anything they need and themselves out of any predicament. Where does the Teen Fence come from, and why do they always use so many charts? Surely, the parents are to blame, but this job remains an essential part of the pop-culture school system, a link to the outside world for characters that might not even be old enough to drive. Every high school needs a fence. Want to talk to them? Step into their office. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Severed flautist

I know this one is more recent (and a bit more specific) than a number of entries on this list, but I haven’t stopped thinking about it since the Severance season-two finale. I’ve been willing to suspend a lot of disbelief in the past regarding Lumon’s incredibly wacky org chart, but questions about that marching band are going to torture me for a while. Were they kept on retainer for that one performance? Did they keep regular 9-to-5 hours? Speaking of, when did Milchick (Tramell Tillman) find the time to rehearse? As we know, he’s duly swamped! The questions just don’t end. Did their outies have to show up in full marching band regalia? And where the hell did they keep them? That office has to be even bigger than previously imagined to house a full marching band without MDR hearing so much as a peep. Do they get jealous that they don’t get to play the Music Dance Experiences? The waffle parties I could handle, but the marching band is unduly frolicsome, even for Lumon. [Emma Keates]

Manchild rehabilitator

The romantic comedy has long been the home of kitschy and unlikely careers—bakers, artists, wedding planners, journalists (ahem)—but perhaps the most ridiculous of them all goes to Paula (Sarah Jessica Parker) in Failure To Launch. She describes herself as a “professional motivator” who specializes in getting adult men to move out of their parents’ houses. Who knew this issue was so widespread and pressing that it could be a person’s whole job? Paula has an entire patented system of emotional manipulation that involves getting men to fall for her, which forces them to grow up, which seems a lot more complicated than just serving your son an eviction notice. Unlikely as her job may be, Paula’s weird-ass legacy lives on in the incredibly funny Jennifer Lawrence comedy No Hard Feelings, which centers on a similar (but even more eyebrow-raising) “parents hiring a woman (but not an escort) for their son” premise. [Mary Kate Carr]

Vague finance guy

Much like in real life, it’s incredibly grating when TV shows—usually sitcoms—have a finance dude whose actual work is as obscure as possible. What does this man do that makes him worthy of an executive title or a boatload of money? Who cares! Not the writers, that’s for sure. Consider How I Met Your Mother’s manipulative Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris), who quite literally laughs off questions about his job for almost the entirety of the show’s run. “Please,” he says, to ensure his role remains as vague as possible. I know, I know, Barney is a ludicrous character in a TV comedy, so the silliness of the job is fitting. But in the finale, HIMYM reveals that Barney provides legal exculpation and signs everything (literally P.L.E.A.S.E, and also what I said as I rolled my eyes while watching it). And to make it clear that they hadn’t thought it through, he’s actually a whistleblower who tells the FBI everything so he can be off the hook. At least this plot twist was as goofy as the rest of the show’s ending. [Saloni Gajjar]

Dangerous animal researcher

Cassandra “Madame” Web’s mother may have been in the Amazon researching spiders right before she died, but she wasn’t the only one doing this kind of work. If there’s some kind of movie animal, be it monstrously sized or somehow magical, you need someone whose job it is to go on the expedition to find it. Take Jon Voight’s Paul Serone in Anaconda, who tags along with a documentary film crew to try to capture the largest known anaconda alive so he can profit. He’s also in the Amazon and also dies there. In King Kong (1976), Jeff Bridges is a primate paleontologist who actually tried to stop the others for heading to Skull Island, though he ends up traveling with them anyway. He, however, gets to live. And who could forget Rebecca Hall’s Dr. Ilene Andrews in the Godzilla Vs. Kong movies, the anthropological linguist who becomes a mother figure to Kong? I pray for her character’s continued safety. [Drew Gillis]

Bag man

It’s common for politicians to have personal aides or even a “body man,” especially at the higher levels of elected office. And if Gary Walsh (Tony Hale) was just a standard-issue aide to United States Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), it wouldn’t be all that notable. But, in keeping with its generally maximalist ethos, Veep turns Gary into the most heightened version of the yes-man archetype. He’s not Selina’s body man; he’s her “bag man,” as she refers to him in “Helsinki.” His most vital responsibility is lugging around a giant bag (which he calls the Leviathan) full of every supply anyone could ever possibly need. He’s constantly on-call just so he can hand her a tissue or a step stool. It’s humiliating, degrading, and he absolutely loves it. [Jen Lennon]