Despite numerous discussions on the impression that managers and business owners have that nobody wants to work anymore, explaining that the problems are the work conditions and pay instead of work itself, people still keep saying that.
Comic Lucas Zelnick witnessed it with his own eyes when he asked a woman from a crowd what she did for a living and was told that she did nothing because her husband was a rich restaurant owner. After the husband introduced himself, he added that nobody wants to work anymore and the comic called the couple out.
Comic Lucas Zelnick went viral when he addressed the crowd and the joke wrote itself
Image credits: lucaszelnick
Lucas Zelnick introduces himself as “a stand-up comedian born, raised and based in New York City who challenges his cushy upbringing through punch-heavy material” on his website. His popularity rose in 2022 and he was the star in several comedy club shows nationwide.
The comic is pretty active on his social media and dedicated his TikTok account to clips from his performances. He is nearing 300k followers and numerous clips have gone viral with over a million views; the most popular one was viewed almost 6 million times.
Lucas asked a woman what she did for a living and her response caused a chuckle in the audience as she said "nothing"
Image credits: lucaszelnick
The video in question has 1.2 million views on Lucas’ TikTok and it was also shared on the subreddit antiwork, where it was upvoted nearly 50k times. It struck a chord in a lot of people’s hearts as it accidentally touched on a problem that many people deal with.
Bored Panda reached out to Lucas and he shared his thoughts on why the video spread so quickly, "I think videos are often shared when they make people feel very strongly about something. In this case, I think that was the character of the rich out-of-touch boss who calls their employees lazy but doesn’t work hard themselves. It became an avenue for people to talk about management-employee dynamics and capitalism more broadly."
Turns out, she has a rich husband who owns a restaurant
Image credits: lucaszelnick
So what the video showed? The clip begins with Lucas looking for someone to interact with in the crowd. It’s a common practice of stand-up comedians to work with the crowd and then work with the responses they get.
He chooses a woman and asks what she does for a living, which is also a very standard question. Lucas is lucky because the woman’s answer is ‘nothing’ and that cracks up the crowd. With further investigation, the comedian finds out that the woman has a rich husband who owns a restaurant.
The husband takes the opportunity to complain about how nobody wants to work in the restaurant anymore, while they are sitting in a restaurant and there are people working. The woman chimes in that nobody wants to work in their restaurant.
You can watch the clip from the comedy show below
Lucas wanted to know more, but he didn't really have a chance to ask the man anything as he started to complain how "nobody wants to work anymore"
The comedian found this statement very ironic because the woman has no job and her husband has a restaurant with vacant job positions and made sure everyone perceived how hypocritical the situation sounds when she complains that people don’t come to work.
Both in TikTok comments and Reddit comments, people were guessing that the owner doesn’t pay decent wages and that the management at the restaurant is poor. People were convinced that what these kinds of owners don’t realize is that people don’t want to work specifically for them. They were also quite confused why the woman’s husband had to point that out when he wasn’t asked.
We were curious to find out if there was any chance that the couple was purposefully wanting to be funny and Lucas described us how he saw the situation, "I think sometimes people in the audience try to do that but in this particular instance it was unclear to me why they were oversharing. Sometimes in a comedy environment people do that because they are being put on the spot."
In general, it seems that it's not so unusual for people be rude and say stupid things during these shows, "being talked to at a comedy show can feel like a high pressure situation for some people, so I think they feel some kind of responsibility to share interesting information. Sometimes it leads them to be too honest in a way that doesn’t reflect well on them."
The wife agreed with the statement and added that it's their experience after Lucas pointed out that they were sitting in a restaurant with staff
While the video was truly funny and Lucas made the most out of the situation, he brought up an issue which is how out of touch some businesses are. Companies think that they've found an explanation why they are struggling to find motivated workers and keep working with a staff shortage: it’s because nobody wants to work anymore. That’s not entirely true, because even if you don’t want to work, you need to. Money doesn't grow on trees, as our parents would say to us.
But Work Vivo has a different explanation: “Employees want to have more control over when and where they work, and employers that refuse to listen are struggling to retain talent. <...> What they fail to understand is that rather than refusing to work, many are refusing to return to a world where work is approached as a one-size-fits-all.”
At this point, the comic needed a second to understand what just happened as the woman just said she had no job but complained that nobody wants to work
Image credits: lucaszelnick
The phrase “Nobody wants to work anymore” has been repeated so much in recent years that it has actually become a meme. According to Know Your Meme, where you can find the origins and meanings of internet jokes, “Nobody Wants To Work Anymore refers to a series of signs that appeared outside American businesses, particularly restaurants, during the spring of 2021 which stated the business was either closed or short-staffed due to 'nobody' wanting to work anymore. The signs generally elicited mockery and parodies as they spread online, as people interpreted them to mean the company was having trouble attracting staff due to low wages and poor treatment of staff.”
People in the comments immediately saw how ironic the situation was and feared that the couple wasn't joking
However, the notion is as old as time and the issue was only sharpened during the lockdowns and the pandemic, as everything else was. Bored Panda has written an article on a Twitter thread in which a researcher and instructor at the University of Calgary, Paul Fairie, provided some examples from the media in which there was a complaint that nobody wants to work anymore.
It is quite funny that they all used such similar formulations and always blamed the workers instead of employers. What is the most important is that the oldest one that Paul managed to track was from a newspaper back in 1894. The same was observed by employers in 1905, 1916 and so on until the current times. You can look through the article here to go to the original tweet here.
They speculated that the owner wasn't paying the employees enough and didn't have good management at the restaurant
You truly can’t say that people don’t want to work, because we need an occupation, our brains want to be used and we want to be useful. It is essential for our survival and in the current system, only a job can earn us money, which allows us to pay for our basic needs.
Also, so many people share stories of quitting their jobs and the next thing on their list usually is to find another job. Only this time, they want to be more selective so they won’t work if they are taken advantage of.
They also loved that the comic called them out and pointed a finger at the issue
Do you agree at least a tiny bit that people don’t want to work anymore? Or do they just not want to work anymore at jobs that don’t give enough compared to what they take? Also, what do you think about Lucas’ and the couple’s interaction? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.