You Don't Have to Be Mad to Work Here: A Psychiatrist’s Life

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It was an inauspicious, and unlikely, birthplace for some of the finest comedies this country has ever produced. In November 1933 “The Evansville Press” of Indiana published an article about Mrs. Frank Churchill (formerly Carolyn Kay Shafer) who was the personal secretary of Walt Disney. She credited Disney with a comical instance about the workplace:¹⁰ Increasingly staff eat on the go, so kitchens and eating areas are now high on the list. Some companies are now even working with outside suppliers to deliver healthy meals direct to their staff, often subsidised, not just as a perceived perk but also as they begin to realise that properly fuelled staff work better, are healthier and perform better. The company roared with laughter when he quoted a motto he had seen over a laboratory In America: “You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it does help.” Indeed taking the health aspects further, greater emphasis is being placed on providing facilities for those who want to walk, run or cycle to work – with changing and showering facilities being provided. We’ve even seen small gyms being incorporated so that workers can take out their frustrations on the weights or the treadmill rather than the boss!

We were so different. Stalin was his hero. He would say ‘purge the bastards’ and had a five-year plan for his career.”Slowly, though, things changed, in society and in comedy alike. “To get rid of censorship was great,” Antrobus recalls. “I worked on That Was The Week That Was, which was radical at the time.” But he’s not quite so keen on how attitudes have ended up.

It turned our mind to what we believe really helps employees when it comes to their workplace. Many spend over eight hours a day, five days a week in this environment, trying to generate income for the company, hopefully trying to be the best that they can be. Now you have this insidious political correctness. Johnny Speight’s work is hardly shown these days, and that’s why this play is dedicated to himAnd now Antrobus has created a new play based around those exciting, if often difficult, times, which he promises is more than a simple ‘tears of a clown’ melodrama or a slice of straightforward nostalgia. In February 1941 engineering students at the University of Michigan published a joke about English professors in the “The Michigan Technic” magazine:¹² You don’t have to visit too many offices, before you will see or hear some reference to the well-worn phrase, ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps.’ In April 1940 the jest was still circulating at the Walt Disney Studio according to a report in a Vancouver, Canada newspaper:¹³ I spent two months sending scripts to Galton and Simpson and their new agency Associated London Scripts They partnered me with Speight, this gruff man from the East End.