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" &amp;quot;Bro&amp;quot; is the most problematic social label since &amp;quot;hipster.&amp;quot; Like that other word I promise to not use again in this post, &amp;quot;bro,&amp;quot; which used to just be short for &amp;quot;brother,&amp;quot; refers to an amorphous group of people you&amp;#039;re supposed to hate, though exactly why is never clear. As far as I can tell, &amp;quot;bro&amp;quot; can be used to describe any outward, unironic display of maleness. Driving a beat-up pickup truck is &amp;quot;bro,&amp;quot; but then again, so is attending an elite university, joining a fraternity, and playing beer pong. All of it is open to scorn. This is The End of Men. We just live in it. Workaholics (Wednesdays on Comedy Central) is, on paper, the most &amp;quot;bro&amp;quot; show on television. It is about three post-college men who live together in a house in suburban Southern California and work jobs they hate at a telesales company. They spend all their time outside of work indulging in the rituals of male partying: getting stoned, eating pizza, drinking beer on their roof, going to a strip club, and so on. But Workaholics, which is probably the funniest comedy show you&amp;#039;re not watching, is too smart to take all this partying at face value. It shows us what&amp;#039;s wrong with the word &amp;quot;bro,&amp;quot; because the characters are too pathetic to be insulting. Workaholics is to Entourage as Girls is to Sex and the City. It&amp;#039;s a post-recession answer to its precursor. The fantasy is gone. The men have no idea what to do with their lives. Their solution is to get fked up. The first episode of Workaholics is admittedly lame: Adam, Blake, and Anders (also the names of the actors) get stoned and attempt to cheat a surprise drug test at the office. It sounds like the setup of a straight-to-video Ryan Reynolds movie. But Workaholics quickly evolves from there and pushes against the boundaries of its premise. The characters continually come across strangers who are completely unlike them. These encounters are the real joy of the show. The joke is that Adam, Blake, and Anders always think they&amp;#039;re the cool ones, but it&amp;#039;s the people all around them who are cool. Juggalos show them how much fun they could be having; a mentally disabled person calls them &amp;quot;pussies&amp;quot;; a group of high-school kids gleefully destroy their house. Workaholics is in on the joke, in other words. In last week&amp;#039;s episode, the premiere of the third season&amp;#039;s second half, Adam, Blake, and Anders are offended they haven&amp;#039;t been invited to the roast of their co-worker. Their boss tells Adam outright that he&amp;#039;s never said a &amp;quot;single&amp;quot; funny thing. So the three roommates stage a surprise appearance at the roast in which each tries to be the funniest by playing a different Mike Myers character. What three roommates would all think a Mike Myers movie is the funniest thing ever? &amp;quot;Bros,&amp;quot; of course. And of course, none of them is funny. You laugh because they&amp;#039;re not funny. (The funniest person on the show, as it happens, is a woman, Jillian Bill, who, in what seems like a conscious diversion from the Entourage template, looks like a real person and not a pinup.) Still, you have to feel bad for the guys on this show. They work so hard to be awesome, until reality knocks them down. To paraphrase Judd Apatow, comedy lies in humiliation, but good comedy empathizes with its victims. Workaholics turns the sneer of &amp;quot;bro&amp;quot; into loving mockery. The characters&amp;#039; problems are, in one sense, easy to relate to. Like a lot of young Americans, they&amp;#039;ve seen their prospects drastically limited, even if economics itself is rarely mentioned. The episode that ended the first half of Workaholics&amp;#039; current season, before its break, was a flashback, in which we saw the guys first meeting in college. They pass a table at a career fair for a telesales company and think, No way, I&amp;#039;ll never do that. It&amp;#039;s a painfully funny and slightly frightening observation about growing up. Sometimes you leave home with dreams that don&amp;#039;t work out, and you&amp;#039;re left sitting in your underwear playing video games and eating day-old pizza. And then the world reduces you to a bro. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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