You Dont Have To Be Mad To Work Here

You Don’t Have to be Mad to Work Here (1983) by Roger Kilroy and Ed McLachlan. Fontana. ISBN: 9780006366683. Condition: Good. Sold by Crappy Old Books, specialists in literature that gently confirms your suspicion that adulthood is mostly administrative chaos with occasional biscuits.

The title is, of course, a lie. Or at least it’s an optimistic opening bid. Because anyone who has ever worked in an office, a public-facing role, a large institution, or basically anywhere with a kettle and a hierarchy will recognise the underlying truth: you don’t have to be mad to work here… but it helps. A lot. Preferably in a tidy, functional way that still allows you to locate the stapler.

Published in 1983 — that blessed era of beige telephones, carbon paper, cigarette smoke as interior décor, and the kind of workplace culture where the phrase “a bit of a character” covered everything from harmless eccentricity to mild criminality — this book sits somewhere between comedy, observation, and the cathartic relief of hearing someone else say, “Yes. It really is like that.”

Kilroy and McLachlan take aim at the daily absurdities of working life: the petty rules, the weird power games, the meetings that could have been a sentence, the memos that read like prophecy, the colleagues who operate entirely on vibes, and the managers who treat the simplest task as a military campaign. If you’ve ever watched a minor decision balloon into a procedural opera, this book will feel like a warm, knowing nod from across the canteen.

There’s something particularly satisfying about workplace humour from this period, because it doesn’t rely on trendy jargon or silicon-valley “hustle” mythology. It’s old-school institutional comedy: humans trapped in systems they didn’t design, trying to make it to Friday without being eaten by bureaucracy. It’s the comedy of forms, of rules, of the sacred filing cabinet, of “just popping this on your desk,” of the mysterious colleague who can get anything done because they possess forbidden knowledge (or simply shout louder).

And, like all good work humour, it’s not just jokes — it’s a survival guide masquerading as entertainment. The laughter is doing a job. It’s the sound you make when the photocopier jams again and someone suggests “turning it off and on” with the reverence of a priest. It’s the sound you make when you realise the same argument is happening for the third time because nobody read the minutes, including the person who wrote them. It’s the sound you make when “quick catch-up” turns into a 90-minute monologue about something that happened in 1976.

Condition: Good — which is exactly what you want in a Fontana paperback designed for real-world handling. It may have been read on trains, during lunch breaks, or in the quiet moments when someone needed reassurance that the madness wasn’t personal — it was structural. It’s got that honest, lived-in feel: the literary equivalent of a slightly scuffed briefcase that has seen things and is still turning up on Monday.

Ideal for:

• anyone who has ever had a job (so, everyone),

• collectors of vintage British humour,

• lovers of office anthropology,

• and those who enjoy the comforting realisation that workplace nonsense was fully operational long before email signatures became a personality.

So if you fancy a brisk, wry, very 1983 companion to the daily theatre of employment — a reminder that the workplace has always been a strange ecosystem of rules, rituals, and quietly heroic coping mechanisms — this one’s for you.

Crappy Old Books — selling you comic relief, one institutional nervous breakdown at a time.

Keep browsing: See more Humour books Other books by Roger Kilroy and Ed McLachlan