Africa Salaryman (Africa no Salaryman; sometimes unofficially translated as African Office Worker) is a slapstick workplace comedy set in the African Savannah of an alternate world of anthropomorphic animals. Each episode mainly revolves around the three main characters: Lion, the kindly lion; Lizard, the somewhat jaded and cynical pogona lizard; and Toucan, a selfish womanizing jerk of a toucan.
This series has examples of:
- 12-Episode Anime: The 2019 anime adaptation.
- Art Shift: The anime frequently switches between 2D and 3D animation. The three main characters also frequently switch to a minimalistic art style.
- Afraid of Blood: Lion claims to be this when he refuses to participate in a blood drive, but since he's not fazed by violent films, videogames or even the sight of Lizard's cut-off, twitching blood-spurting tail, which he claims is because he considers it to be Lizard's "default state", he's probably more accurately Afraid of Needles.
- Bad Boss: President Turtle always keeps a stack of bills over his head just so that he can show off his wealth, calls his workers office drones and makes them do random things on a whim and plans to fire Lion, Lizard and Toucan if their proposal for a cinema cafe doesn't get accepted.
- Bland-Name Product: The series features "Haagen-Duck" ice cream, "Bom Beam" whiskey, and "Mooc Donald's" fast food, among others.
- Bloody Hilarious: One common running gag is Lizard losing his tail, which results in gushes of blood.
- Carnivore Confusion: Smaller animals often get scared that Lion will eat them.
- Censored for Comedy: Most occurrences of Lizard eating or preparing to cook various insects get pixellated, allegedly because the viewers would complain about it if they didn't. This also applies to the "mystery sushi" that Lion's daughter Shishimura and her friend Gorimi come up with, although apparently it's surprisingly tasty once you get past the texture.
- Cherry Blossoms: One episode sees the gang head to the park for cherry blossom viewing.
- Crazy Workplace: The main trio has the kinda-hearted Lion with a Face of a Thug, the lazy Toucan who is a Manchild, and the hardworking Deadpan Snarker Lizard. And these are the sanest of the coworkers, topped with President Turtle, who's very open about treating the employees as corporate slaves.
- Dude, Not Funny!: In the last episode, Toucan gets a phone call and then says that the client changed their mind and does not want to work with their company after all, but then says he was just kidding. Nobody finds this funny and he gets beat up by Lizard for it.
- Face of a Thug: Lion, due to his size and species, is very physically intimidating. Truthfully, Lion's a nice guy.
- Fearless Fool: Honey Badger lives up to his species memetic fearlessness, up to the point of challenging elephants and sharks.
- Furry Confusion: Most characters look like furries but a small number are talking animals. In one episode, when Toucan goes to a mixer he finds out at the end that the pig girl sitting across from him was actually a non-anthropomorphic animal the whole time and was really the pet of the girl who didn't show up and the reason he didn't ditch the pig outright was because he overheard that the actual pig girl was extremely rich and thought that pigs have their own language.
- Insurance Fraud: When Honeyguide is desperate for money, he goes to a shady loan company but they refuse to give him the money, mostly because he asks for a ridiculous sum, and instead instruct him to take out a life insurance policy on his hated boss which they're willing to finance instead and then kill him.
- Jerkass:
- Toucan. He's lazy, he's a womanizer, he's greedy, he trolls his coworkers constantly, he once antagonized Lion while Talking with Signs to the point where Lion nearly killed his dentist, and he descends into Vitriolic Best Buds with Lizard and Lion so much that you wonder how the two can stand him.
- Honey Badger frequently bullies Honeyguide, the employee working under him.
- Honeyguide, thinking that if he can't be happy then no one should be happy, frequently pulls mean pranks on his fellow office workers.
- Crane dresses like a ninja and refuses to communicate with any of his coworkers outside of Talking with Signs or text messages and is more concerned with getting huge amounts of YouTube views than the privacy of his fellow employees when he posts pictures of them doing embarassing things, tanking the company's stock value to zero as a result, and instead of attending the company BBQ, he's making YT videos about building self-made bombs that he also plans to use on them.
- Karmic Butt-Monkey: Toucan, any time he gets caught up in something when he's being his usual jerkass self he pays for it. He gets beaten up by Lizard for making a nasty joke, gets hit by a car while being late for work and playing it off, and in general is disrespected and made fun of by his coworkers constantly. The roomba incident where it calls him garbage and then corrects itself to say he's double garbage (which is immediately noticed by Toucan) is a good example of this.
- Killer Rabbit: Lethal Hamster is a small hamster who is usually carrying around a pair of kitchen knives as big as he is. He never actually kills anybody in the show (although it was implied that he murdered a toucan offscreen in one episode) and mostly is there to be cute.
- Only Sane Man: In the anime OP it's shown that Lizard is one of the only competent employees of the company, writing down notes while moving while Toucan, in contrast, falls over and drops all the papers he's carrying. He's also shown to have a relatively stable home life, since he talks about his wife several times. That said, he's also Not So Above It All and is just as likely to engage in the wackiness going on as the other two.
- Shout-Out:
- The first episode's opening as well as the anime's opening theme show a place that looks suspiciously like Pride Rock. In a later episode, Lizard suggests that Lion can also eat the bugs he's grilling for himself on a BBQ because he saw it in a movie, which Lion protests as being fictional.
- In one scene, Lion was trying to tell a joke about certain car models - he then posed sideways and roared, claiming to be a Peugeot logo.
- One episode where Toucan was trying to score a date involved several Jojo references.
- Lizard pulls out a Duel Monsters deck in the same scene. His voice actor voiced Seto Kaiba.
- After getting hit by a truck in one episode, Toucan shows up in a later scene lying in a crater in a very familiar pose.
- When a flashback segment shows how Caracal joined the company, he saves President Turtle from a group of bullies who're beating him up and wanting to check if they can make him bounce off walls when kicked like in Mario Kart.
- They Killed Kenny Again: Honey Badger dies in several episodes as a result of his fearlessness and need to prove his strength only to later recover.
