Wankernomics – SHOW_V4.1_FINAL_USETHIS at Astor Theatre
Saturday, May 9, 2026
Before Charles Firth and James Schloeffel even appeared onstage at the Astor Theatre, Wankernomics had already landed its first laughs. An onscreen QR code instructed the sold-out Saturday crowd to submit questions for the “Wankernomics Thought Leadership Symposium”, while corporate hold music and anticipation filled the room. Expanded to three Perth Comedy Festival shows after the first sessions sold out quick-smart, the production’s popularity already proved the pair’s central thesis: few things unite Australians faster right now than mutual psychic damage from workplace culture.
Best known as a co-founder of The Chaser, Firth arrives with obvious satirical pedigree, but Wankernomics is far less ambush-comedy chaos than his earlier work. Instead, the show operated through recognition, mirroring back the grotesque language systems audiences already spend their lives trapped inside. Schloeffel played the ideal counterpart: less chaos agent than fully indoctrinated corporate survivor, smiling through the pain with dead-eyed managerial enthusiasm.
By the time the pair walked onstage in matching office attire and lanyards, opening with the sort of synthetic empathy familiar to anyone who has survived an HR workshop or all-staff Teams meeting, the room was convulsing. Every buzzword hit like a trauma response: Circle Backs, Hard Stops, Optimisations. “Lunch and learn sessions” drew one of the biggest laughs of the night—a bleak sign of just how many people in the room have lost portions of their finite existence to morale exercises involving stale wraps and PowerPoint slides.
Structurally, the show resembled less a stand-up set than an unhinged corporate onboarding session mutating slowly into immersive theatre. PowerPoint decks, fake charts, audience analytics, passive-aggressive email translations, mock LinkedIn posts and management frameworks piled up with the suffocating logic of office life itself: endless language generating endless process while meaning quietly dies in the corner.
Particularly sharp was the show’s understanding that corporate jargon no longer remains confined to offices. Gambling ads interrupted proceedings. Fake software updates hijacked the presentation. A mock Duolingo collaboration promised to make audience members “fluent in Wanker.” Increasingly, the production suggested modern capitalism has evolved beyond selling products into something more invasive: a total linguistic environment where every interaction now arrives filtered through branding, optimisation, and customer engagement metrics.
Some of the strongest material emerged not from fabricated absurdity, but from reality itself. Athletics Australia’s real-world rebrand into “Australian Athletics” was presented with the reverence of revolutionary thinking. British American Tobacco trademarking the phrase “A Better Tomorrow” barely required embellishment. Elsewhere, Firth and Schloeffel proposed that entire HR departments and workplace value systems now primarily exist to manufacture tasks for managerial classes after much meaningful labour has already been outsourced or automated. Judging by the Astor crowd’s reaction, this theory struck a little too close to home.
Crucially, Wankernomics never let the audience sit comfortably outside the joke. Consultants received one of the loudest cheers during a rapid-fire room audit of professions. Audience participation escalated steadily. “Shared values” projected early in the evening instructed attendees that “we laugh at all the jokes” and “we give standing ovations at the end of the show”. Naturally, those instructions became more important later.
Without spoiling where the production eventually lands, the final stretch proved particularly effective in demonstrating how seamlessly corporate logic now infiltrates entertainment itself. Subscription tiers, software limitations, automated customer service dead-ends and performative audience engagement spiralled together into something increasingly excruciating—and recognisable.
That’s what ultimately separates Wankernomics from generic office humour or recycled LinkedIn parody. Beneath the buzzwords and KPI gags sits a far uglier observation: most people no longer actually believe in corporate culture but continue performing belief because modern working life increasingly depends on enthusiastic participation in systems everyone privately recognises as hollow. The joke is not that corporate language is ridiculous. The joke is that it has become the dominant language of contemporary life altogether.
CAT LANDRO