It’s a scene many office workers would recognize — a consultant arguing with their boss about how they should be logging, or not logging, the hours they’re putting in, using insider language like daily “touch points” and charging the “client code.”
Eventually, the boss slips up.
“We just don’t want your utilization to get too high so we have a reason to lay you off when it comes to layoff season,” the boss says. “Oh, wait. I said the quiet part out loud.”
The scene — “Timesheets In Consulting Make No Sense” — is actually a comedy sketch, one of the most viewed videos on Joe Fenti’s Instagram account. It’s racked up 1.8 million views and hundreds of comments from users who say they can relate.
Fenti, a 29-year-old in Boston, is also saying the quiet part out loud, depicting the frustrations that are all too common in corporate America but often go unacknowledged.
They’re situations he knows firsthand: Before becoming a full-time content creator and stand-up comedian, Fenti spent five years as a consultant at a Big Four firm.
“I found myself doing a lot of repetitive work and just noticing a lot of silliness in the workday,” Fenti told Business Insider.
When he started posting videos online, the ones mocking corporate culture resonated the most, and not just with fellow consultants but also with folks in other fields like accounting, investment banking, and private equity.
“Wow, this is such a universal experience,” he realized. “Corporate is corporate is corporate.”
Transitioning from consulting to content creation
Lampooning professional services firms comes with a large potential audience, as the Big Four — Deloitte, EY, PwC, and KPMG — collectively employ 1.5 million people.
Fenti started working as a consultant in 2019. Little frustrations quickly started piling up, like having to write emails for his boss to a client, but the boss knew everything that needed to be in the email, so he had to ask the boss what to write. “The whole time I’m thinking, ‘This would be so much faster if you just did this,'” he said.
When he began posting videos around the spring of 2021, the ones about work were taking off, so he started posting more frequently. Since around 2023, he’s been posting six videos a week, and for much of that time, he also had his full-time consulting job.
“I really was maximizing every minute of my day just to make this content and comedy thing work,” he said. He’d write his scripts during the day on a notepad so he could film immediately when he got home. He’d edit his videos while on the bus to work or to a stand-up comedy show.
By early 2024, the money he was making from content, primarily from brand deals, exceeded his consulting salary. He said he realized he was treating his consulting job more like a side gig and quit in early 2025 to do content full time. Today, he has nearly half a million followers on Instagram and more than 340,000 on TikTok.
Corporate workers want to see their frustrations acknowledged
Fenti said he always loved comedy, but never imagined it could be something he actually did for a job. He remembers saying to his friend when he first started, “If I even make a dollar doing this, it’ll be a good adventure.”
While he makes most of his income from content, he also travels for stand-up comedy shows and plans to do more of that. He also recently recorded a 60-minute special that should be coming out this spring.
Even as a content creator, it’s hard to escape the realities of corporate culture. He’s had brands approve a script only to ask for edits once the video was already done. But he loves being his own boss and setting his own schedule.
Now that he’s left the corporate world, he can’t imagine ever going back. “I love not having to get anything approved,” he said. “It’s whatever I think is funny.”
While his comedy goes beyond mere mockery of corporate culture, it’s a topic that continues to resonate. A year out from his consulting job, he said he still has no shortage of ideas for jokes about work.
Fans come up to him after shows and tell him his videos helped them get through a hard time or an especially annoying project. He thinks people want to see their world reflected back at them, and that they appreciate seeing the frustrations they’re experiencing actually be acknowledged.
“People want their lives to be seen and understood,” he said. “When you have a humor page about it, that’s really the most understanding you can get.”
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