Adam Kotsko describes on pages 7 and 8 the concept of radical awkwardness–situations which encounter awkwardness through the intersection of contradicting or confront coinciding norms. He goes on to emphasize that situations of radical awkwardness can be compounded if the clashing social constructs also represent differing cultural perspectives. Using this concept to extend past national or ethnic bounds and instead speak to aspects of professional and economic class, I think this framework works very well for much of the comedy in Armando Iannucci’s HBO show Veep. Particularly with the character Jonah Ryan, as with the example I am choosing, much of the humour in the series comes from people who are dedicated to their jobs in politics and willfully eroding their social skills as they take on abrasive and demanding personas to better their political standing, leading to interactions between “normal people” representing the voter base, and “politicos,” represented by the cast of the show, wherein the politicos almost always come off as psychotic. Jonah is a character who had little to no social skills to begin with and, through his sycophantic career, found himself running for congress. My selected scene features Jonah’s campaign team running a focus group on their television advert. The radical awkwardness in the scene arises first from the lack of charisma Jonah exhibits throughout the ad and the accordingly hostile response that the focus group gives him. This first convention of a terrible ad being torn apart by a focus group is then confronted by Jonah entering the room, which everyone empirically understands is not the correct response to a negative focus group. Jonah then berates the focus group and begins threatening to fight them. The awkwardness is conpounded for the audience by the fact that Jonah entirely lacks self-awareness, and the humour therein is generated as his campaign team helplessly attempts to reign him in. The scene speaks to the interactions between “normals” and “politicos” as it demonstrates Jonah’s complete social disconnect.