The military rank most often made fun of; a Lieutenant is an officer, and therefore outranks all enlisted personnel (often well over 50% of the total force), but:
- he doesn't outrank any other officers*, so he is often their coffee boy, and
- he has (typically) no practical experience.
The situation is right out of Dilbert; your boss has been assigned over you not because he knows what he's doing, but because somebody has taught him to be the boss. In any case, Lieutenants generally fill middle management roles, and so are ripe for jokes like those in Office Space. In combat, however, ineptitude is handled in a manner Charles Darwin would approve of: in Vietnam, the average life span of an Army Second Lieutenant in the field was under 4 days.
The pronunciation of "Lieutenant" is another strange thing that makes American Lieutenants laugh when they go to any country formerly owned by the UK (not counting America). I've never met any English Lieutenants, so I don't know if they laugh about it when they come over here, too, but the difference is in the first syllable:
They say "LEF-ten-unt", we say "LOO-ten-unt", and the original French pronunciation is closer to "LYUH-ten-awng". When I was last over in the UK at Mildenhall Royal Air Force Base (shortly after I had gotten my commission as a second lieutenant), I was waiting for my flight back to the states when the lady behind the counter called out my rank and last name over the loudspeaker. I almost went into a convulsive giggling fit.
*
except in the Navy, where a lieutenant is equivalent in rank to an Army Captain--an O-3.