As a student of film history, I know that violence is a long-standing, even essential element of cinematic grammar and audience catharsis; as a Christian, I find it increasingly difficult to accept portrayals of brutality that are glib, meaningless, played for laughs or cynically nihilistic.
In the novel's close notice Frank is a deluded, dissipated bore who imagines himself "as an intense, nicotine-stained Jean-Paul-Sartre sort of man," but is merely an adulterer spicing his talk with literary references while following work so stultifying and meaningless that he even laughs at himself.
Sixteen months later, with its plans to push into overseas markets in tatters, and the meaningless new name a laughing stock, Roberts left, Consignia was consigned to the history books, and Royal Mail bosses hoped the £2m rebranding would be forgotten as soon as possible.
We are no longer in an era where threats lodged over the internet are routinely laughed off as meaningless gestures that ought to be ignored by victims, law enforcement and society at large.
Like the best British comedies, Corporate is rarely kind to its characters, but there's something humane in its ability to unite us all in laughing over the inescapable despair of meaningless work.
When he told me this I wanted to laugh, because it seemed like the most meaningless, homespun deception.
The conservatives denounced him as a "revisionist," which always gets a laugh from professional historians because it is a meaningless label since we are constantly "revising" our historiography.
Simon Blackwell, the writer and executive producer for the popular political TV show, told the Guardian he laughed when he heard Mr Turnbull use the "most meaningless election slogan we could think of".
More than this, existence itself is absurd and random and fundamentally meaningless, and may as well be treated as such; it may as well be laughed at.
But that laughing-crying bit is used here so often, and so exaggeratedly, that it becomes as mechanical and meaningless as a conditioned reflex.
