The Printer From ‘Office Space’ Did Nothing Wrong. It Probably Wasn’t Even Broken.

If you clicked on this article, we’re probably already on the same page about the film and scene I’m talking about. Office Space is a 1999 dark office comedy film, the first live-action film by indie animator Mike Judge that satirizes corporate interpersonal politics of the 90s. It’s an eminently quotable film with some of the most iconic scenes in comedy film history.

The scene in question is the outcome of a movie-length running gag regarding a printer that is constantly jamming and destroying the steadily increasing number of reports the office workers are expected to turn in every day. It’s a bit of mounting slice-of-life tension that boils over into a scene where they drag the printer out into a field and destroy it in the style of a mobster hit. This was apparently inspired by the printer Mike Judge was using while writing and developing Beavis And Butthead Do America, and the fantasies he had begun to develop about destroying it when production was done.

Besides being a funny and cathartic scene, it was also very experimental and controversial and took some maneuvering to even get in the movie in the form we saw. The studio was not happy with the music, and they had to put together a special focus group to keep it. Most of it the acting was improvised, and they went through…