boffer
Explanation
This comic imagines "Office-LARP" — live-action role-playing set in a corporate office environment — as a form of stress relief.
In the comic, a person dressed as a fantasy character stands behind what appears to be a reception desk at a place called "ROSS," saying: "Don't worry, this is just a boffer memo. But let me know if it's too much." Another person, holding a document labeled "Assignment with an unreasonable deadline," responds: "No, no, I'm enjoying the adrenaline."
The caption reads: "Office-LARP was remarkably therapeutic."
The joke inverts the usual premise of LARP, where participants escape mundane life by pretending to be warriors and wizards in fantasy settings. Here, the characters are instead role-playing the stresses of office work — unreasonable deadlines, memos, bureaucracy — suggesting that for some people, the anxieties of corporate life provide the same kind of adrenaline rush that others seek from fantasy combat. The term "boffer" refers to foam weapons used in LARP to safely simulate combat; here it's applied to an office memo, implying that workplace communications can be their own form of weaponry.
The deeper humor is the suggestion that office stress is so universally recognized as intense that people would voluntarily simulate it for fun, much like how people enjoy horror movies or roller coasters precisely because they provoke anxiety in a controlled setting.