ONE of the many pleasures of watching “Mad Men”, a television drama about the advertising industry in the early 1960s, is examining the ways in which office life has changed over the years. One obvious change makes people feel good about themselves: they no longer treat women as second-class citizens. But the other obvious change makes them feel a bit more uneasy: they have lost the art of enjoying themselves at work.

The ad-men in those days enjoyed simple pleasures. They puffed away at their desks. They drank throughout the day. They had affairs with their colleagues. They socialised not in order to bond, but in order to get drunk.



The cult of fun is deepening as well as widening. Google is the acknowledged champion: its offices are blessed with volleyball courts, bicycle paths, a yellow brick road, a model dinosaur, regular games of roller hockey and several professional masseuses. But now two other companies have challenged Google for the jester's crown—Twitter, a microblogging service, and Zappos, an online shoe-shop.

Twitter's website stresses how wacky the company is: workers wear cowboy hats and babble that: “Crazy things happen every day…it's pretty ridiculous.” The company has a team of people whose job is to make workers happy: for example, by providing them with cold towels on a hot day. Zappos boasts that creating “fun and a little weirdness” is one of its core values. Tony Hsieh, the boss, shaves his head and spends 10% of his time studying what he calls the “science of happiness”. He once joked that Zappos was suing the Walt Disney Company for claiming that it was “the happiest place on earth”. The company engages in regular “random acts of kindness”: workers form a noisy conga line and single out one of their colleagues for praise. The praisee then has to wear a silly hat for a week.



If it's fun, it needn't be compulsory

While imposing ersatz fun on their employees, companies are battling against the real thing. Many force smokers to huddle outside like furtive criminals. Few allow their employees to drink at lunch time, let alone earlier in the day. A regiment of busybodies—from lawyers to human-resources functionaries—is waging war on office romance, particularly between people of different ranks. Hewlett-Packard, a computer-maker, recently sacked its successful chief executive, Mark Hurd, after a contractor made vague allegations—later quietly settled—of sexual harassment. (Oracle, a rival, quickly snapped up Mr Hurd.)

The merchants of fake fun have met some resistance. When Wal-Mart tried to impose alien rules on its German staff—such as compulsory smiling and a ban on affairs with co-workers—it touched off a guerrilla war that ended only when the supermarket chain announced it was pulling out of Germany in 2006. But such victories are rare. For most wage slaves forced to pretend they are having fun at work, the only relief is to poke fun at their tormentors. Popular culture provides some inspiration. “You don't have to be mad to work here. In fact we ask you to complete a medical questionnaire to ensure that you are not,” deadpans David Brent, the risible boss in “The Office”, a satirical television series. Homer Simpson's employer, a nuclear-power plant, has regular “funny hat days” but lax safety standards. “Mad Men” reminds people of a world they have lost—a world where bosses did not think that “fun” was a management tool and where employees could happily quaff Scotch at noon. Cheers to that.