You could probably write a decent book (well, someone could, if not YOU) about the differences in style between this decade's great impressarios of half-hour animated television: South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Simpsons and Futurama creator Matt Groening, and Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill creator Mike Judge. Parker and Stone are masters of the gut-busting vulgar joke, while Groening's work leans more heavily toward satire and absurdity, though there's also as much of the absurd in South Park as there is in Springfield.

Of the three, Judge's humor is the most subtle; like so much great comedy, it's grounded in a firm reality around which craziness swirls. Where Homer Simpson is an insane lampoon of a father with a pure heart, Hank Hill is earthy, filled with warmth but often too emotionally distant to share it. With Beavis and Butthead, Judge reversed the equation; his title characters were wild caricatures of the early-nineties teenage boy, thrust into a normal world that they reacted to with absolute immaturity. Still, the comedy was essentially a balancing act along the line between reality and absurdity.

Office Space is Judge's live-action writing and directing debut, as funny and grounded as King of the Hill yet dealing with an entirely different realm of our world: life as a cog in the abysmal wheel of middle-corporate America. Once again, Judge is carefully measuring doses of reality and absurdity, taking average characters similar to folks we might know and tossing them through wild satirical situations.

The satire in Space is built around an office rebellion at Initech, led by Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) and his two partners in crime, Michael Bolton (David Herman) and Samir (Ajay Naidu). Peter's girlfriend schedules time with a hypnotherapist to help him relieve his stress, but the doctor suffers a heart attack before he can properly break Peter from his trance, leaving him in a perpetually easygoing mental state. He starts blowing off work completely, behaves like an animal when he does go to work, and initiates a gutsy romance with local waitress Joanne (Jennifer Aniston). An outside consulting firm hired to evaluate the employees of Initech gives Peter high marks, even though his behavior defies expectations at every turn, and he's in line for a big promotion in spite of his goofishness. But when his two best friends are fired, he launches an elaborate scheme to steal millions of dollars from the company--one half-cent at a time.

For the most part, the film is broken down into two halves: the wacky comedy of Peter's early rebellion and success, and the more in-depth plot line introduced when the trio decides to steal from the company. The laugh-til-you-cry moments are mostly packed into the first half of the film, but the entire movie fits together as a fine piece of satire on the nature of office work in the late nineties. These are beaten, soulless people, shoved into slots that most rational beings would reject and left there to live out their lives in abject mediocrity. You can't blame them for their rebellion. Anyone would do the same.

The dull throb of despair brought on by a bad job is in all the characters, even Joanne and her dead-end job at the Bennigans-esque Chotchkies restaurant, but it's most poignantly evoked in the character of Milton, portrayed exceptionally by Newsradio's Stephen Root. (He plays the southern boss of the radio station on the TV show, but you will not recognize him. Trust me. You just won't.)

In Milton, all the agonies and frustrations of the office universe are brought to life. He has no certainty in his career; everything from the status of his job to the placement of his desk is subject to the random whim of his superiors. As a result of this wayward work environment, he's begun to go a bit crazy. It's his lunacy that allows the ending's twist to redeem all the lead characters. He's more than just a convenient plot device, though: he's the dark flipside of the young and cocky trio of main characters. He lost his chance to escape long ago, and he's been rotting at Initech ever since.

While the antics of others in Office Space make you laugh until you cry, Milton's journey through the movie might just make you cry. Peter and his cronies point out the absurdity and sillienss of corporate America, where Milton's little more than a punching bag, suffering the anguish borne of the corporation's complete disregard for the value of humanity itself. He's treated like a subhuman, banished to the building's basement, required to act as company exterminator to the cockroaches in his new "office." Through it all, he can barely muster a wimper.

In his powerlessness, he seems to represent most of the audience watching the film. When he gets his grand revenge in the movie's conclusion, he's acting for all who have rotted at shitty jobs for most of their lives. Yet he's just a piece in the film's comedic puzzle, and that complexity of Judge's approach toward office life is what makes Space such a great movie--aside from the fact that it's so goddamn funny.

If you work in an office, the combination of wacky comedy and sharp satire in Office Space will likely make you laugh, cry and shout with rage all at once. And if it also leads you to quit your job on Monday morning, then it's probably done its work.