Greg Daniels’s champion mockumentary, “The Office,” probably wouldn’t get made today. If you’re a fan, that’s a sentence you’ve heard at least a dozen times over the years since the series ended its run in 2013 after nine seasons. In today’s iffy cultural climate, there’s hardly any studio or streaming company that’d roll the dice on something so bold and often outrageously offensive. If you want an example, watch “The Paper” (a spin-off series from the same creator), which is a lovable, goofy, and hilarious sitcom (that I instantly fell in love with), but also a mockumentary that’s extra light in every aspect compared to its predecessor. Even the harshest joke or gag in it has merely a fraction of the rudeness that “The Office” episode “A Benihana Christmas” offers in season 3, for instance.
I bring up that episode specifically because the show’s star, Rainn Wilson (who played the insufferable yet uproarious Dwight), also cited it as an example in a recent episode of “The Last Laugh” podcast (via Variety). It’s an episode that blasts through some pretty racist and sexist boundaries for a laugh. And Wilson’s assessment of it is damn accurate. As he said:
“Listen, you know the Benihana Christmas episode where Michael and Andy draw with a sharpie on one of the Asian women that they’ve brought back to the Christmas party is jaw-droppingly kind of horrific. They’re clueless and in their cluelessness they’re racist and insensitive, and they’re always saying the wrong thing. And that’s Michael, Dwight and Andy — and Kevin for that matter. So it’s a show based around clueless, insensitive, racist, sexist people that kind of mirrors the United States in a lot of ways. You want to encourage it, because it’s funny as hell and it also kind of skewers a particular American sensibility. But it definitely goes pretty far if you dig deep.”
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The Office ofte went too far, but it was the kind of risk that paid off
Steve Carell and Ed Helms as Michael and Andy in The Office – NBC
For any sitcom these days, it’s extremely hard to find a balance between funny and insensitive. That’s kind of the name of the game. It’s no secret that stand-up comedians repeatedly try making waves by joking about controversial topics. By its very nature, comedy often involves risks and delicate subject matters that usually end up offending someone somewhere without intent. However, there’s a big difference between mean-spirited insults and genuinely clever observations, whether it’s rooted in something awkward or not, and “The Office” was the undefeated victor of walking that tightrope. Did it go too far sometimes? Sure. But that was kind of the point.
Daniels and Co. did that by focusing on ignorant everyday people who often did ignorant, stupid, blatantly racist, and sexist things. I mean, Steve Carell’s Michael Scott was built on that. And it was funny and relatable because we knew (or met) people like that. We were aware that they very much existed, and the show’s brilliance was to simultaneously mock them while also giving them humane characteristics (see Michael, once again) to make them likable. But sometimes — in episodes like “A Benihana Christmas”— all of their worst tendencies and poor traits came out at once. In retrospect, that might seem horrific and harsh today, with today’s cultural standards, but that’s what made “The Office” a champion of its time.
As Wilson pointed out, “It’s a tricky conversation, you know? Could it happen today? I think it would have to be very, very different if it were made in this environment.”
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