Scroll through TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts. Comedian Lisa Beasley repeats her star-studded performance––adopting a persona she calls, “Corporate Erin.” “Corporate Erin,” or Corporate Erin Thropolis, is more a sentient AI than a real person. She is smothered by bulky, conspicuous lanyards. She rambles on about missed “deliverables” and “client desks” with an acrid corporate accent. Each video features some crisis––real or imagined––for which her intervention––helpful or unhelpful––is necessary. As Erin enacts her managerial duties, her attempt at a laid wig lifts in jest. Lisa Beasley is beloved by almost 500,000 followers, including myself. One of Lisa’s one-off shticks has turned into her international brand and a new gospel for Corporate America. Through her, the corporation could spark laughter, instead of disdain.
As the “Manager for Managerial Managers at Managers of McManagement,” Corporate Erin is the indecipherable, middle-management operative. She talks with an exaggerated vocal fry, skewing professional, plastic, and almost pedantic. “Corporate speak” offers her a limited yet expansive vocabulary. In meandering monologues, she abuses language through odd, circuitous constructions: “bandwidth,” “close the loop,” and “circle back.” They resist meaning. Each sentence trails off, left unresolved, despite the urgency of her managerial commands. Don’t leave the meeting; don’t take maternity leave; don’t forget to add your father’s funeral to the “death portal.”
But, sorry, I misspoke. Erin calls them recommendations.
Still, nothing lurks beneath her rhetoric. Regardless of her mandatory Zoom meetings, you will never penetrate her plastic frame. Erin stares with dead eyes, an awkward face, and a smile expecting your (silent) approval.
“Corporate Erin” is a farce at its extreme. She adopts the quintessential behaviors, values, and idiolect of the corporate “manager.” But she intensifies it past comfort. Her comedy unspools the distortions of post-industrial life, from its obsession with care to its cruel empathy to its fickle attempt at inclusion. It is simultaneously indecipherable yet utterly recognizable. It starts to peel away at the patina of the boss beneath the clown.
And viewers respond. Comments reflect a variety of emotions: anger, fear, frustration, amusement, joy, revelry, and anxiety. Their total effect is bewilderment. One commenter noted, I’m so triggered, and I also can’t stop laughing. My body is confused.
“Corporate Erin” is a comedy made through the violence of self-recognition. Her dry gulps vibrate phone speakers. Her bulging eyes pierce glass screens. Another video loads; another video loads; another video loads. This isn’t your boss, but Erin repeats it the same. It’s the feeling that matters, not where and when you feel it. The Internet and its digital along with physical architecture structure time, space, and feeling with algorithms, circuits, and loops. She captures an algorithmic feeling by reproducing “triggering” intimacies. Each virtual meeting reminds the viewer of their boss, with each intensity heightening recognition. It’s an eerie transparency. Virtual spaces ought to offer you a moment to breathe, but Corporate Erin brings you back to zero state. Capital’s face is digitized, as you, the viewer, are turned into (but, already, were) the worker beholden to its tasks. Commenters note that they stopped watching because of PTSD from corporate work.
Still, the vast sense of difference draws the viewer back in. Corporate Erin is, evidently, not the viewer’s boss. She’s a faithful copy but only a stand-in. In fact, she’s under your control. Laugh! Mock! Scream! Revel in her fantasy––she’s always been yours, hasn’t she? She can’t belittle, command, or antagonize you. Her job is to amuse, entertain, and even jest––and it’s for you. You surveil her. You circulate her. She’s “the boss,” but you’re in power.
“Corporate Erin” becomes the worker’s cruel panacea. She offers a strategic distance (and distraction) from their predicament. You can express fully, in all your variegated emotions, absent the authority of a wealth-wielding overlord. But the double character of these freedoms is fleeting. It authors a fictive role reversal, supplanting the worker/viewer above “the boss,” above exploitation, and above capitalism. Just watch another clip.
This is the emotional tenor of Corporate Erin’s social existence. Each view repeats the same consumptive feedback loop––satisfying the worker/viewer with one more release. And there are enough commodities to consume. Watch her daytime features on the Tamron Hall show to see her wacky, personable look! Buy her book, “Circle Back Follow Up Close The Loop: Corporate Dictionary Vol. 1 by Erin Throlopolis,” to learn corporate speak! Buy custom-made mugs like “Corporate Gulp,” “Circle Back Follow Up Close The Loop,” and “This Meeting Could Have Been An Email” in her swag store! (You can drink coffee with them.) Place a “Gulp” sticker on your company Mac to read the newsletter she sends at 9:01 each day! “Corporate Erin” isn’t just the woman behind the screen. She repeats capitalism’s lessons of production, consumption, and circulation. It’s a carnival, of course. But you have to clock in the next day.
Her mimetic comedy elides politics in its excess. She demands the existence of the post-industrial workplace for her own existence. There cannot be redress, or reckoning, under this logic. There isn’t a revolution in the corporate carnival. You have to find it in consumption and the corresponding release. In doing so, she becomes a willing spectacle for the worker/viewer. It’s a symbolic victory for the viewer and a real defeat for the worker. Ultimately, her mockery is a critique that ends up justifying capital––placing it just outside the bounds of substantive critique.
Lisa Beasley hit gold with “Corporate Erin.” She’s been sponsored by Microsoft and Jared Jewelers. (Fortunately, you can’t buy blood diamonds from her “swag store.”) Her comedy paints capital beautifully, but its impressionism distorts the conditions it attempts to describe. The allure is dangerous. The digital comic becomes the ultimate source for conflict and self-consciousness, not the system at large. “Corporate Erin,” in all her trendy iterations, emerges as capital’s chorus, negating itself through performance, jest, and parody. She’s an unassuming safety -valve for the worker/viewer’s destructive passions––directed towards socially productive ends. In the end, we become her “elite employees.” The reality principle doesn’t feel much harder than this.
So dance in front of her hall of mirrors. Chuckle in the remaining silences. Buy some kettle corn. Isn’t anti-capitalism fun? Just make sure you’ve paid the ticket before you arrive.
