Despite its lack of international recognition, every year many comedy films are produced and released in Japan. These films, aiming to make audiences smile and laugh through gags, jokes, parodies or satires, usually make fun of well-established institutions or social values. Particularly, this paper will focus on Japanese comedies set on workplaces and the term “working comedy” will be used to identify a corpus of films that portray in a comical way the labor conditions and activities carried out by workers of specific fields.

The presentation will be divided in three sections. First, a brief literature review of previous research on Japanese comedy films will allow us to recognize different types of humor and the main characteristics of these works. Secondly, the notion of “working comedy” will be defined and exemplified through the discussion of several contemporary Japanese films. And, to conclude, special attention will be paid to the strategies used by filmmakers to reinforce or undermine the dominant ideology regarding work in Japan. The methodology will combine discourse analysis with concepts from Cultural Studies and Japanese Studies in order to determine in which ways values such as authority, hierarchy or corporate indoctrination are portrayed. Several comedy films dealing with different work areas such as healthcare, transportation, or the media will be analyzed.