Welcome to Dunder Mifflin

It’s August 2006, just a few weeks before season three was set to premiere, and The Office is nominated for three Emmys: Steve Carell for lead actor, Michael Schur for writing the episode “Christmas Party,” and all of us for Outstanding Comedy Series. It’s the biggest validation we’ve gotten as an ensemble since starting this crazy journey. And unlike the Globes, we even got to sit inside the auditorium this time. But in true Office fashion, we just couldn’t manage to do things the easy way.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: The limo kept breaking down. There are all of these issues and it was a hundred degrees out.

ANGELA KINSEY: We got to your house and then the limo wouldn’t start. So we get to the Emmys late.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: It’s our first Emmys and—

BOTH: We miss the red carpet.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: It’s just started and we’re an Emmy-nominated television show and we are locked out of the building.

ANGELA KINSEY: And we’re like, “We’re on The Office.” And the guy’s like, “Whose office do you work for?” I’m like, “No, The Office.”

The cast members who made it inside the Shrine Auditorium in L.A. are having an equally surreal experience.

JENNA FISCHER: We were the new kids on the block. The critics loved us, but we were not a frontrunner to win. So it was a complete surprise when we won. Many people there had no idea who we were. I remember running into the cast of Scrubs, and they were like the big-deal guys and we were the newbies. They were super nice to us. Cut to eight years later. I remember being at an awards show and running into the next batch, the new freshman class of TV darlings. And I remember thinking, “Oh, I’m Scrubs now.”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: We’re not allowed to go in. So we’re standing there, sweating.

ANGELA KINSEY: We were disintegrating.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Conan O’Brien was hosting and we miss the opening monologue.

ANGELA KINSEY: And we’re in the opening monologue! Conan came to our set and shot a whole thing.

In the prerecorded bit, Conan, dressed in a tux, emerges from the ceiling air ducts in the Scranton office and drops onto Dwight’s desk. He has a brief flirtation with Pam, confessing during a talking head interview that “if I didn’t have an award show to host, I could easily see having two or three seasons of will-they-won’t-they sexual tension that ultimately goes nowhere.”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: And we miss it. We’re not there. It started out a disaster, but we ended up winning.

The Office beat out Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Scrubs, and Two and a Half Men to win Outstanding Comedy Series.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: We all swarmed the stage, which took a while because they put us waaay in the back of the theater. Greg Daniels accepts the award, and we head offstage in total disbelief.

BEN SILVERMAN: It was the greatest, it truly was. We were so joyous. We were so young. We were so happy. I remember holding that trophy on that stage. And I don’t think I let go of it for the entire night. It was like, “Mom, we made it.”

JENNA FISCHER: I remember backstage lifting up Kevin Reilly and holding him up like you would at a sporting event. ’Cause Kevin was the person who kept us on the air when we didn’t have great ratings. He was the one who fought for us.

ANGELA KINSEY: All you guys lifted him in the air and that’s the photo that made the L.A. Times.

KEVIN REILLY: Yeah, I have that picture in my office.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: The look on your face is just priceless.

KEVIN REILLY: I did ultimately get fired. So [The Office winning an Emmy] didn’t save my job. But those moments are rare, where you’re doing good work with good people and everyone is doing it for the right reasons.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: And yet you still got fired.

Despite a track record of 235 Emmy nominations and fifty wins for the network, Reilly was released from his contract with NBC in May 2007.

KEVIN REILLY: Life is full of ironies.

It felt like we were finally a hit. But were we really? Even with the accolades, could we finally just relax and enjoy the ride?

MELORA HARDIN: I didn’t even believe we were a hit after we’d won the Emmy. I didn’t believe it until we won the SAG Award [in January 2007], and I had to walk around with that fifty-pound statue all night. The next morning I woke up and my biceps was so sore that I couldn’t lift my arm. It was like I needed physical proof. I had done so many things in my career that were like semi-successes. I just didn’t believe it.

BEN SILVERMAN: The Office became a darling of the network, but it was still not at the level of other hits in the history of broadcast comedy. Its ratings were good, but it wasn’t the number one show on TV ever. But we never spiraled out of control cost-wise. It was easy to produce and a well-priced show. We were never going to blow up a building.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I don’t know if you remember this, but in 2007 the entire cast and crew did a panel at PaleyFest [an annual television festival hosted by the Paley Center in Los Angeles], and we were all sitting in the semicircle and being idiots, just telling jokes and making the audience laugh. And then the moderator addresses a question to Ben, and Ben goes into this effortless five- to seven-minute speech about the history of comedy and tracing The Office’s roots from All in the Family and making all of these just incredibly artful and insightful comments, like a dissertation on comedy. Then he stops talking and it’s quiet, and then Greg turns to the moderator and says, “That’s why he’s my boss.” That moment has resonated with me forever.

BEN SILVERMAN: The connection that both Greg and I had was about the architecture of television and our shared love of television.

GREG DANIELS: When I grew up in New York, on PBS, you’d get Monty Python and Fawlty Towers and you’d go, “Oh my God, British TV is so great. It’s so smart.” And they would only get our best stuff. The UK would only get Friends and Seinfeld. They grew up with the exact same feeling of, “Oh my God, we can never compete. American TV is only the best, the best of the best.” When I was expressing at some point to Ricky and Stephen how much I was a fan of British TV, they were like, “Most of it stinks.” They’d seen all of the failures.

Greg and Ben, just like Ricky and Stephen, were students of TV comedy: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Both the British and American versions of The Office may have seemed like true originals, but they were filled with comedy archetypes and conventions that had been around for decades and, in some cases, for centuries.

“The Social Contract Is Broken in Tiny Little Ways”

Cringe Comedy and the Hilarious Tragedy of “Scott’s Tots”

JENNA FISCHER: In some ways The Office was ahead of its time, but we couldn’t have existed without shows like The Larry Sanders Show, Freaks and Geeks, Arrested Development. These were all shows that helped develop a trust in the single-camera comedy. And all of the Christopher Guest mockumentary movies. There were things conspiring in our favor before we came along.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I always felt like our deepest roots were with Cheers. The only difference was our show was about people who had to show up every day, whereas on Cheers, they chose to show up at this particular place. But we both had the familiarity and constant interaction.

GREG DANIELS: I agree with you. I also used to compare us to Hogan’s Heroes in the beginning. ’Cause the staff were like prisoners, all trying to outwit the boss. I don’t think that’s the main influence at all, but it’s fun to think about it.

All of those shows and movies had one thing in common, which was also one critical element of The Office: cringe comedy. A guy who knows a lot about that is Ed Helms.

ED HELMS (“ANDY BERNARD”): Testing, testing, testing. This is why I like headphones. ’Cause I can get really intimate.

Ed joined the show in our third season as Andy Bernard, the Nard Dog, a graduate of Cornell (ever heard of it?) and a man known to break into unsolicited a cappella.

ED HELMS: For some reason, our generation embraced the comedy of failure and awkwardness and poor communication. My parents never got The Office. They were mortified by it, all of the awkwardness and the tension that we think is so funny. For our parents, especially southern parents—repression is a very powerful force in southern families—awkwardness is so intolerable that they weren’t able to see the humor in it.

ED HELMS: On the Daily Show, especially with the correspondent field pieces, it was all about finding extremely tense moments. We would revel in the awkwardness because that tension is funny.

In one of Ed’s most infamous Daily Show segments, from 2004, he gets drunk at a firing range and argues with the owner of a biker bar in Arizona about whether patrons should be allowed to drink while armed. “Logic tells you that alcohol and firearms don’t mix,” the heavily tattooed bar owner tells him. “Yeah,” Ed responds, “if you’re a pussy.”

ED HELMS: We would try to make the bad guy squirm, whoever the villain of a field piece might be. I don’t know why that’s funny.

PAUL FEIG (DIRECTOR): To me, the most awful, embarrassing moments in your life are so hellish when you’re going through them, but to watch somebody else go through the same thing is so liberating.

Paul Feig directed some of The Office’s biggest episodes (“Office Olympics,” “Halloween,” “Dinner Party”) and later became an executive producer on the show. He’s one of the most influential producers and directors in comedy today. But before all that, he was involved in bringing a new wave of American cringe to TV with Freaks and Geeks.

PAUL FEIG: On Freaks and Geeks, I re-created this car accident I got into when I was sixteen years old. Lindsay [played by Linda Cardellini] is driving and she gets distracted and this car hits her. I remember when we were shooting it, I couldn’t stop laughing. It was just this release of all the angst I’d kept ever since I was a teenager, by making somebody else have the same terrible experience. So there’s maybe a cruelty to it, but to me at least, I find it very cathartic.

I thought, “Who wouldn’t love to watch the most embarrassing, cringey moments of their teen years re-created for them?” And the answer was nobody wanted that, at least back then.

Freaks and Geeks, which averaged less than seven million viewers (compared with eighteen million for its time slot competitor Who Wants to Be a Millionaire), was canceled in 2000 after just twelve of the first season’s eighteen episodes had aired. Garth Ancier, the NBC exec who canceled the show, called it “an awful decision that has haunted me forever.”

PAUL FEIG: Every time I’m going through something horrible, I’m like, “You’re going to have the greatest story to tell later.” All this terrible stuff happened to me in high school, with bullies and embarrassing moments. But in my twenties, when I would hang with friends, I would bring down the house every time with my stories, because they were so much worse than everybody else’s stories. And that was the moment when you go, “There’s something in this.”

EMILY VANDERWERFF (TV CRITIC FOR VOX): Really this tradition comes from the Brits. Fawlty Towers is a show that kind of plays in that vein. And people didn’t really want to see that on American television in the eighties.

American TV at the time was more hopeful. Even M*A*S*H, a show about military surgeons during the Korean War, was full of unironic optimism. We started to get hints of cringe in the U.S. during the ’90s with shows like Seinfeld.

EMILY VANDERWERFF: Seinfeld is a big breakthrough for a show that had cringe elements and you were supposed to fundamentally find those four people . . . I won’t say likable, but relatable. And then the British Office is the big breakthrough for what we think of as modern cringe comedy.

STEPHEN MERCHANT: It was not our intention to make people squirm. It was just that, for us, it was so much funnier when someone who was trying to be funny, for instance, said a joke and then you just sat in silence. I don’t know why, Ricky and I just found that so funny. It was only when we started hearing from people, “Oh, that made me feel really uncomfortable,” or “I had to watch it through my fingers,” only then did it occur to us, oh, maybe this is not always as enjoyable for other people as it is for us.

STEPHEN MERCHANT: I think maybe it was like, if you work on a horror movie and the blood is fake and the knife is not real, you can just keep adding more violence and more bloodshed. And you go, “Ha, this is great.” And then when you watch it with an audience, they’re like, “Oh, this is horrible.” I think for us, it was a bit like that. It was so funny to us to just keep turning the screw and making this world uncomfortable. I don’t think it occurred to us that people would find it cringe-worthy until they started telling us. And then of course we just doubled down and were like, “Oh, well now we’re going to really lay it on.”

The center of cringe on the British Office was the boss, David Brent. Ricky Gervais says that the cringey aspects of Brent came from the wide gap between who Brent wanted to be and who he actually was.

RICKY GERVAIS: David Brent wanted to be a philosopher and a teacher, he wanted to be cool. He wanted to be sexy. He wanted to be funny. He wanted to be all those things that he wasn’t quite, and that is comedy at its most basic, particularly in a sitcom. A sitcom is about an average guy or gal trying to do something that they’re not equipped to do. That’s what we’re laughing at, the blind spot. So I just made David Brent all about the blind spot.

Which brings us to David Brent’s descendant, Michael Scott, who had to be different from Brent in some key ways. Michael couldn’t completely alienate himself from his employees, for instance. That would end the show.

PAUL LIEBERSTEIN: I think one of the biggest changes was Steve’s performance. To the extent that Ricky’s character could just straight-out insult someone and not care, that would never happen with Michael. He could insult someone thinking he was complimenting them. He could be unaware, but he could never be mean.

EMILY VANDERWERFF: Because we simultaneously identify with him and with all the people working under him. We’re getting both sides of this relationship, which is where cringe comedy lives. Michael is frequently awful. His employees have to work under him and we watch how that relationship shifts and changes, how they negotiate the spaces between them, and the ways that social contract is broken in tiny little ways.

Like when Michael replaces his girlfriend’s ex-husband with himself in a family photo.

Or when Michael insists on hoisting a new, larger employee onto a conference table as part of a welcoming ceremony.

Or when Michael, under oath during a deposition for Jan’s lawsuit against the company, describes his girlfriend’s . . . assets.

Sometimes the cringe factor wasn’t something we could so easily separate from as a viewer. Greg wasn’t just about singling out Michael for ridicule, but finding the ways in which we all, embarrassingly, behave like Michael.

MELORA HARDIN: They would take things that we would say and turn them into jokes. The whole breastfeeding-at-the-office scene happened because I was breastfeeding my daughter at a brunch with Greg and his wife and Steve and his wife at Greg’s house. I think it made Steve uncomfortable, and I was just like, “Dude, my child needs to drink.” I felt very feminist about that. We can carry guns in this country, but you can’t breastfeed a baby? That’s what our boobs are for, you know? I think I even said that at the brunch. And Greg was like, “Oh my God, this is amazing. We’re doing this.”

A breastfeeding scene was shot for the season five episode “Baby Shower,” in which Jan breastfeeds her daughter in the office, while Kevin (and eventually Creed) watches a little too creepily, but it was eventually cut.

And then there’s the season six classic, an episode that’s become a classic for being unwatchable, even among die-hard fans: “Scott’s Tots.” It took cringe to the extreme, with Michael unable to keep a promise he made years ago to some third graders.

There’s even a subreddit called “CannotWatchScottsTots,” with (as of this writing) almost seventeen thousand subscribers, where Office fans bond over their inability to sit through the cringiest of all cringey episodes. “I’m only around 9 minutes in the episode,” one person wrote, “and can I just say how excruciating this is to watch?” Another noted that despite their “super-strong stomach” and love of horror films, they couldn’t sit through the entire thing.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: There are so many people who come up to me and they’re like, “I’m the biggest fan of The Office, but I can’t watch ‘Scott’s Tots.’” “Dinner Party” is straddling the line, but “Scott’s Tots” is the one where people are like, “No.”

GREG DANIELS: I think Ricky and Stephen put it in the bones of the show, right? Michael does the wrong thing. The show knows what the right thing is, but he doesn’t and he’s always doing the wrong thing. Michael intended to be successful and to be a hero and a philanthropist and to make a big, positive impact in these kids’ lives. That was his intention. It was a good intention. If you get that right, you can get all your jokes but still protect the character. It really hurt Michael that he wasn’t able to be the guy he thought he was going to be when he made those promises. So you got all your “he’s a jerk” jokes, but you were also like, “Aww.”

“Scott’s Tots” was written by Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, who also wrote “Dinner Party,” the other Office episode considered among the most cringey in the series’ entire run. That can’t be a coincidence.

LEE EISENBERG: Gene and I really liked the cringe comedy of the British Office. That’s a comedy engine that we really dug, trying to make it as grounded as possible, but also sitting in a moment for a really long time after a character says the wrong thing. And then you can’t get out of it. Both of those episodes are very claustrophobic, because you’re in a condo [“Dinner Party”] or you’re in the classroom [“Scott’s Tots”].

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: “Scott’s Tots” is considered the most difficult to watch by a lot of fans. Are you proud of that?

LEE EISENBERG: Incredibly, yeah. Nothing makes me happier. I mean, other things make me happier, but I’m very pleased.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: No one wants to watch it, and you’re pleased about that?

LEE EISENBERG: Well, I think that the comic premise is so strong and it’s like, what can you do to keep turning the screw and make it feel worse and worse? Like when they start dancing. Michael was just sitting there and he also loves performance and he loves dance, but he also knows that he can’t get out of this. It was incredible.

Incredible is one way to put it, super awkward is another. Cringe was an essential part of Michael Scott’s character. And as with many leading men over the history of comedy, so was his handling or mishandling of sensitive social issues.

“It Makes Us Think About Television Differently”

Michael Scott as the Next Archie Bunker

Another comedy archetype that influenced The Office is the lovable yet un-PC leading man. There have been many throughout the history of TV comedy: Homer Simpson, Fred Sanford, Al Bundy. And then there’s the granddaddy of them all, the character that redefined just how unlikable a TV lead could be and still make audiences love him: Archie Bunker, the patriarch of All in the Family (1971–1979) and its spin-off, Archie Bunker’s Place (1979–1983), and perhaps the least woke leading man to ever grace prime-time TV.

PAUL FEIG: It’s a real close race between Carroll O’Connor and Steve Carell for me. There’s other people who were great, like Danny DeVito on Taxi. But that was a supporting character. Characters like Archie Bunker are always convinced they’re right. And when they say something terrible, it’s like, “What? What did I say that’s so terrible?” It’s that weird innocence of thinking you can get away with it.

GREG DANIELS: Archie is a man with some good human qualities but some bad, bigoted opinions. But Michael Scott wasn’t a bigot, he was a nine-year-old that repeated jokes he heard without thinking.

EMILY VANDERWERFF: The thing about Michael Scott is that he has un-PC moments, he has moments when he’s racist and sexist and whatever, but it makes those things look pathetic. Like he’s trying too hard to be funny and doesn’t understand the line between like a good joke and actual overt offensiveness.

EMILY VANDERWERFF: Michael Scott came out of a culture where a lot of jokes were that kind of joke. We still had a lot of comedians who were deliberately thumbing their nose at societal conventions, who were saying, “This is bad, and we should say that.” Michael Scott is trying to be that kind of comedian and utterly failing at it. And that’s the joke about him. You’ll sometimes see people talk about homophobic jokes on Friends. You don’t really get that with The Office. When Michael Scott says something homophobic, the joke is on him in a way that has allowed the show to sustain itself in this era of people being more aware of the harm that kind of humor can do.

RICKY GERVAIS: It’s important that people know the difference between the subject of a joke and the actual target. The target was actually people pretending to be all those good things, but not quite getting it right. We were taking a stab at this false notion of pretending to be about equality and fairness, but getting it wrong.

STEPHEN MERCHANT: The big problem for Michael Scott and the David Brent character to some degree is they just didn’t know when to stop. They didn’t know what to say but they always have to be talking. Sometimes silence is golden, but not for them. They just have to speak. And they think they are great joke tellers. They think they have great personalities, they want to show off for the cameras that are filming them. And so they never shut up. They don’t realize how they’re coming across to the world.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Michael Scott made us look back and see all those earlier comedy heroes in a different light, which was a broader trend in the early 2000s.

EMILY VANDERWERFF: The Office came out in the era of antihero television. Antihero television often asked us to consider actions we considered heroic in other characters in a new light. We’ve seen a million action heroes kill people and just be like, yeah, whatever. But if Tony Soprano’s killing somebody, now we have to think about the morality of that. It deepens our understanding of the kinds of characters, not just on The Sopranos but on other shows. It makes us think about television differently. There’s a similar quality in Michael Scott. He’s obviously not killing people, but he’s definitely making us think about the ways that the emotional and psychological behavior of other TV comedy heroes in real life would be kind of pathetic and sad.

It’s a difficult tightrope to walk. How do you make a character both represent all that is ugly and un-PC in our culture, but at the same time make him somebody sympathetic, somebody we want to root for and can’t help but cringe when he says the wrong thing yet again? Well, it helps when he’s played by somebody with the comedic brilliance of Steve Carell.

ED HELMS: Steve’s character on The Daily Show was at its best when he was a version of Michael Scott. Not self-aware and usually less informed than everyone around him. On The Daily Show, he really pioneered the segments in which the correspondent is the butt of the jokes, as opposed to making fun of somebody else, which is easy and mean-spirited. Usually it’s shooting fish in a bucket and it’s not interesting.

STEVE CARELL: Senator, how do you reconcile that you were one of the most vocal critics of pork-barrel politics and yet while you were chairman of the Commerce Committee, that committee set a record for unauthorized appropriations?

JOHN MCCAIN: [Says nothing, looks confused.]

STEVE CARELL: [Bursts out laughing.] I’m just kidding! I don’t even know what that means.

(From The Daily Show interview with presidential candidate John McCain, December 1999)

ED HELMS: Steve shifted that and found a way of being an idiot news reporter and still getting great satire into his pieces. That was hugely instructive for me.

JEN CELOTTA: We could get away with more because Steve was so gifted. We could push things because he could have that undercurrent of humanity. I mean, certainly there were lines, but we could push that so far and still have it read true.

We knew we were working with one of the all-time greats, but the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences apparently did not.

PAUL FEIG: Steve Carell never won an Emmy. It makes me mental. Alec Baldwin [who won the lead actor in a comedy Emmy in 2008 and 2009, for 30 Rock], I love him, he’s the funniest guy in the world. But that was a showy part. People would say to me, “Steve just shows up and he’s crazy.” Are you fucking kidding me? First of all, he’s not crazy at all. He’s one of the most even-tempered guys I’ve ever met in my life. But for comedy to be good, it’s gotta look easy. If it looks sweaty and like people are trying too hard, it’s terrible. But when it’s so great that it looks real, people go, “Well, you’re not doing anything.”

BEN SILVERMAN: It’s a disgrace. The guy was and is a comedic tour de force, but also a pathos-ridden empath who just delivered on emotion and sadness and real feelings through his portrayal that was as good as there’s ever been on television, and television didn’t think so.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Ricky, what do you think about the fact that Steve never won an Emmy?

RICKY GERVAIS: Didn’t he?

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Never.

RICKY GERVAIS: How many did he get nominated for? He must’ve gotten nominated every year.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: He probably got six or seven, but he never won.

Steve was nominated for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series for The Office six times between 2006 and 2011.

RICKY GERVAIS: Wow. In your face, Steve Carell. [Laughs.] I hadn’t realized he’d never won an Emmy. That is a travesty. But who cares? It doesn’t mean anything. It’s an amazing performance. He doesn’t need Emmys to validate that.

Carell’s comedic powers weren’t just in making the audience laugh. He had the same ability to make a cast member break character and burst into laughter during filming.

MATT SOHN: The good thing about a talking head scene is the camera was on a tripod, not on my shoulder. The bigger challenge was to not break when the camera was on my shoulder and there were some extra shakes and giggles.

VEDA SEMARNE (SCRIPT SUPERVISOR): We all laughed so much that sometimes it was hard to finish a scene. And I had to put that in my notes. I’d say this scene was great up until they all broke. That was something the editors would mention to me sometimes. You know, “I can’t cut this. Somebody’s breaking in every take.”

RANDALL EINHORN: Once one person goes, then there’s somebody else who goes.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: We had to take breaks from shooting because of laughing.

RANDALL EINHORN: It was too much giggling.

JEN CELOTTA: I was biting my cheek at times. I would go home with like welts and stuff in my mouth.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I had a trick.

JEN CELOTTA: What was your trick? Why didn’t you tell me this then?!

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: With my index finger and my thumb, I would bury my fingernail into the side of my thumb.

JEN CELOTTA: Oh my God! It worked?

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: It was just trying to just think about that small amount of pain that was there and not Steve being “Prison Mike” or whatever.

RANDALL EINHORN: Steve was usually the last one holding on to some shred of sanity and not just losing it and giggling. Once he went, it was over.

STEVE CARELL: I’ll crack up as much as anyone, but I try not to because I always feel like if I laugh, it’s going to ruin whatever they’re doing. And if I crack up it’s unusable. But there are times that I’m sure you can see tears welling in my eyes. That was one of the hardest things, to not lose it.

Besides Steve, the cast member most likely to send people into hysterics was Rainn.

JOHN KRASINSKI: Rainn had this look on his face that would make me break every time. His face didn’t even move, but like some energy came out and I would just lose it.

JEN CELOTTA: There was one moment with Rainn where he’s doing a talking head. I cannot remember the topic, but Greg had to leave. He couldn’t be in the room. He left the stage. He was outside the building.

We weren’t always laughing because something was especially funny. Sometimes it was hard to decipher between what was real and what was acting.

JEN CELOTTA: There was a moment, I don’t remember the episode but I think I wrote it. I was on set and Steve was doing a scene with Holly [played by Amy Ryan]. They were having this kind of intimate scene and then they started laughing. And I started laughing because it was so real, I just thought they broke. Steve turned to me and I was like, “Oh my God, I’m sorry.” He’s like, “We’re acting here!”

“Bring Me the Big Tureen”

When Comedy Got Physical at The Office

Physical comedy may not be the first thing you think of when it comes to The Office—we weren’t exactly doing Buster Keaton–style slapstick—but there was a physicality to many of the performances that could be easy to miss.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Rainn Wilson and I were really the only two that came from theater, like Shakespeare and Chekhov.

JOHN KRASINSKI: Don’t throw that in my face.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: No, what I’m saying is that for him and I, in terms of character construction, the physicality was a conscious decision.

JOHN KRASINSKI: I just tuned you out. It’s just highbrow theater garbage. Did you also learn fencing at school? Come on!

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I did.

JOHN KRASINSKI: I wasn’t trained at all.

RAINN WILSON: I was in the NYU grad program, and I did a lot of clowning and physical theater. I’m not trying to sound pretentious—like, “Oh, Mr. Theater”—but when you get that kind of training, a lot of it is about finding a character in your body. There were certain elements of Dwight that if I needed to get into character, I put my focus in certain parts of my body and I would immediately be Dwight. Like a straight neck and hips forward. I don’t know if you notice that Dwight always stands too close to people. If someone’s sitting down and he’s standing next to them, his hips look really big. He had a little bit of a swagger and the shoulders thrown back. What about you, Brian? Did you have some for Kevin?

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: For me, it was my jaw. I knew there was a specific place that I could put my jaw that was him.

RAINN WILSON: You had a weird mouth. Your lips would be a little like pursed.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Yeah, exactly. I also had the idea that Kevin was not aware of the size of his body and so he wouldn’t think that he could, you know, potentially injure a smaller person. Which to me was always hilarious when I would come up against Angela. I just wouldn’t see her there and I’d knock her around. There was something about my torso that doesn’t move agilely from side to side.

CREED BRATTON: I thought of my character as a cracked tuning fork. It’s fibrillating and it’s ready to break. The physical comedy is from [the French mime, actor, and filmmaker] Jacques Tati, the way he physically walks, and the facial expressions are Jack Benny, George Gobel, and Bob Newhart. It’s a juxtaposition of all those characters that I loved.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Was there something to the physicality that helped you get into that character?

CREED BRATTON: It was like giving myself a hiccup. It was almost a nervous twitch to be him. I’m much more serious and thoughtful than that character. But when I’m behind the desk, there’s chicanery involved. There’s escaping from the law. It’s thinking, “Are they going to find me out?” That was always my backstory. “Are they gonna find me out?” So every time I would look at anybody, in the back of my mind was “Are they going to see that I’m just faking it here, that I’m cheating them and stealing from them?” After a while it just becomes ingrained in your behavior.

RAINN WILSON: So this is where we could talk shop a little bit, because I love the history of clowns and of clowning. It really started with the comedies of the ancient Greeks. You know, like Aristophanes’s The Frogs and some of those plays. What’s the one where they all have boners? Um . . . the women withhold sex from the men until they stop the war. Anyone?

We looked it up. It’s Lysistrata (aka The One Where They All Have Boners).

RAINN WILSON: Anyway, so it all starts back then and then swiftly moves to commedia dell’arte, which sprang out of Roman theater and had these comic tropes that would travel all over Europe. They always had the dopey clown like Kevin. They had the weird, intense clown like Dwight. Basically all of comedy in the Western world is based on those tropes from commedia dell’arte. They influenced Molière, obviously, but also Shakespeare and vaudeville.

Those tropes eventually made their way to The Office. The dialogue may have gotten more attention, but the physical antics happening in the background were just as important.

KATE FLANNERY: It’s fun to do physical comedy. And I was thinking about the first Valentine episode, in season two, when Phyllis is getting all these gifts and flowers from Bob Vance, and Pam is really upset and you just see Meredith with her Big Gulp. We find out at the end that she’s drinking and she’s passed out at her desk with a lime in her hair. What a perfect little C story, just long enough. We get it. I feel like there was so much power in being someone who got to do the physical stuff. Everybody wants to be the star, but there’s something to be said for holding that space in the background and not wrecking it.

BRENT FORRESTER: I directed the scene where Kevin spills the chili.

During the cold opening for season five’s “Casual Friday,” Kevin brings a pot of his “Famous Chili” to the office. It is, he explains in a voice-over, “probably the thing I do best.” A line made tragic when he accidentally dumps his chili all over the bullpen carpet.

BRENT FORRESTER: We were going to build a chili tureen with a fake bottom, so it looks like it’s filled but Brian won’t have to carry seventy-four pounds of liquid chili. But, Brian, you looked at the expensive prop with a slanted bottom so that it seemed to be filled but wasn’t, and you were like, “I’m going real. Bring me the big tureen.” You carried that incredibly heavy chili container. We only got two takes.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: One.

BRENT FORRESTER: One take?

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I did that in one take. For whatever reason, it has become the thing for which I am known now.

BRENT FORRESTER: I own a T-shirt with you carrying the chili.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: They put down a piece of carpet that went from the hallway around the reception desk and over to Jim and Dwight’s area.

BRENT FORRESTER: Because the chili would’ve screwed up the carpet forever. The moment when you take printer paper and try to mop up the chili is so brilliant. Everybody knows printer paper doesn’t absorb at all. It’s just this Sisyphean doomed effort to clean up.

RAINN WILSON: One of the things that I said to Greg [Daniels] early on is I really love physical comedy and I think Dwight soars when he’s doing physical comedy. I told him, “Please consider writing as much physical comedy for me as possible.” I think you could do a compilation episode of The Office’s best physical comedy bits. Like the fire drill episode . . .

DWIGHT: People learn in lots of different ways, but experience is the best teacher. [Lights a cigarette.] Today, smoking is gonna save lives. [Throws cigarette into garbage can filled with paper and lighter fluid.]

RAINN WILSON: Or the “Baby Shower” episode.

DWIGHT: Do you have the Sharpie?

MICHAEL: Yes, I do.

DWIGHT: Okay, when the baby emerges, mark it secretly in a kind of a mark that only you could recognize and no baby snatcher could ever copy.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Even you giving Kevin a massage. Do you remember? You climbing up on the wall?

RAINN WILSON: I was on my feet on the filing cabinet behind you as I was doing that. In every episode, I would say we had at least one or two big bits of physical comedy. I don’t think that gets quite enough props or attention from people.

“The Bassoon-Playing Weirdo in the Corner”

The Comedy Duos of Dunder Mifflin

EMILY VANDERWERFF: Comedy teams are as old as comedy. In TV, I think you certainly have to look back at Lucy and Desi. That’s the birth of so much TV comedy, I Love Lucy, where there are multiple fun relationships to follow: Lucy and Desi, Lucy and Ethel. Fred and Desi, Fred and Ethel. All four of those characters have interesting relationships among them.

RAINN WILSON: Think about The Honeymooners, Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton. And the rhythms of the clowns in Warner Bros. cartoons, and the early sitcoms of Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore, and these constantly evolving archetypal forms. I really view comedy duos like Michael and Dwight, and Dwight and Jim, as being inheritors of the history of comedy.

EMILY VANDERWERFF: That became sort of the standard for the American sitcom. A British sitcom can be about a single character in a way that an American sitcom cannot. Think about the show Fleabag. We’re stuck in her point of view and we’re seeing the world through her eyes. American TV comedy is built on relationships. And the more interesting relationships there are within a show, the better that show tends to be.

The Office had no shortage of interesting relationships, thanks in large part to Greg Daniels. Here’s how he explained it to Rainn Wilson.

RAINN WILSON: We never talked about scenes. Never ever. One of the things Greg said early on is, “It’s never about the character, it’s about the duo. How is that character in relation with other characters?” Dwight doesn’t have to be funny. Dwight and Jim should be funny. Dwight and Pam should be funny. Dwight and Michael should be funny. Dwight and Kevin should be funny. A lot of mistakes they make in television comedy are funny characters that aren’t necessarily funny when they’re together.

Dwight and Jim could be funny separately, but the true comedy magic happened when these two polar opposites came together.

PAUL FEIG: It’s a classic setup of the person who just wants to drive the other person crazy. But why it worked is that even though Dwight was always upset about it, it never made him hate Jim.

GREG DANIELS: They were equally matched and could stand up to each other. It was like, oh, okay, I see how this is gonna play out endlessly. This is like Spy vs. Spy.

Spy vs. Spy, a regular comic in Mad magazine since the early ’60s, follows two birdlike espionage agents—Black Spy and White Spy—who try to sabotage each other, often with dynamite and other weapons.

JOHN KRASINSKI: What the writers did so well was make those pranks kind of loving and brotherly. I wasn’t being mean. I think that Dwight just represented everything I didn’t want to be, or so I thought.

PAUL FEIG: There was no malice about it. It was just everybody trying to get through the day and not go crazy, you know?

JOHN KRASINSKI: The beauty of our show is they would allow Rainn’s character to have heart. You felt bad for him at times, and then he’d totally not make you feel bad for him because he’d do something crazy.

As the British singer-songwriter Tom Rosenthal sang in “Jim and Dwight,” his 2020 love ballad, “You took pleasure in each other’s misery / but those pranks were a cover for a synergy.”

RAINN WILSON: One of my favorite moments was directed by Paul Lieberstein. I think it was in the episode “Money” [from season four] and it’s Dwight and Jim in the stairwell. Dwight is heartbroken over Angela, and Jim gives him some really heartfelt advice, relating it to what happened with him and Pam.

JIM: I lost it, Dwight. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t concentrate on anything. Even weird stuff, like food had no taste. So my solution was to move away. It was awful. It was something that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, and that includes you.

RAINN WILSON: Dwight has his head down in his hands and Jim slips away, and then Dwight reaches out as if to put his arm around Jim and hug him. It would’ve been their first hug ever. It’s this awkward kind of moment. I always think if Jim hadn’t left and Dwight had put his arm around him, they might have bonded in a way that wouldn’t have allowed the show to go on. Because they wouldn’t have been the nemesis to each other anymore. They would have connected too deeply. And you can’t have that on the show. You want to have them not connecting episode after episode after episode. To me, that little moment defined what The Office was. It had absurdity and reality at the same time. It was based in heartbreak, but it was twisted into something odd and awkward.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Probably our most iconic duo was Dwight and Michael. The two of you together were so stupid.

STEVE CARELL: So stupid.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: So stupid, but so funny. Michael and Dwight are both clowns. There’s no straight man, which is pretty unique, but it’s a complicated relationship. Dwight loves Michael and is desperate for his love in return. Michael is desperate for love from anyone but Dwight.

GREG DANIELS: I always viewed Michael as a nine-year-old and Dwight as a teenager, in terms of their comic energy.

PAUL FEIG: I mean, there’s not really a parallel to them, ’cause it’s not Laurel and Hardy and it’s not Abbott and Costello. It’s this weird thing where they needed each other, but Michael doesn’t want Dwight’s acceptance.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Part of what made it work was that each of them contributed their own kind of weird, particularly Dwight.

PAUL FEIG: It’s a character that could have easily been so over the top, but there’s a humanity to him. He’s just that guy we all know who’s striving and wants it and wants it so much and tries to kind of throw everybody else out of the way. But he’s still sensitive.

RAINN WILSON: The thing I hate the most about comedy is when someone knows that they’re being funny. I think the key to the comedy on The Office is that none of the characters thought of themselves as being funny. I think the documentary element helped with that. I tried to play Dwight as outrageously as possible and as grounded and realistic as possible at the same time. So he could do just preposterous things, but I always tried to motivate them internally.

BRENT FORRESTER: Rainn was not making fun of this guy. He was celebrating him. And it just seemed so obvious to him that that’s what one would do. You could see how much he loved Dwight. He brought this energetic adoration for the marginal guy.

RAINN WILSON: Look at any scene with Dwight, no matter how ridiculous, you can always tell what Dwight is feeling and what he’s going through on the inside and what he thinks he’s hiding. And I think that that allowed people to relate to him. So those moments when Dwight was sad or hurt or disappointed, people really felt for him. Even if he was being haughty or arrogant, there’s a big kid in there too.

JEN CELOTTA: In terms of comedy duos, I think Dwight and Michael are up there with the greatest. Their characters are so specific, in Dwight’s wanting to be more than he is in Michael’s eyes. I mean, I’m thinking of “Drug Testing” [episode twenty of season two], when Michael asked for Dwight’s urine.

MICHAEL: I went to an Alicia Keys concert over the weekend, and I think I may have gotten high accidentally by a girl with a lip ring.

DWIGHT: Are you serious?

MICHAEL: I need clean urine for the lady.

DWIGHT: But that’s illegal.

JEN CELOTTA: It’s the ultimate ask, going against Dwight’s ethics and responsibilities as a sheriff. But then this is Michael asking him . . .

RAINN WILSON: Steve is like a virtuoso violin player with a Stradivarius. He can be funny and pathetic and sad and moving at the same time. Playing Dwight, I felt more like the bassoonist. Or the cello to his violin, something like that. Part of Dwight’s job, and part of my job as an actor, is just to keep him off balance a little bit. I don’t need to do what Steve does. I improvise pretty well, but I’m not a virtuoso. I’ll do my thing. My thing is to be the bassoon-playing weirdo in the corner.

The real trick to why these relationships felt so real, connected to the comedy past but also uniquely original and fresh, wasn’t just what was written on the page.

JENNA FISCHER: It’s so hard for me to think about Pam’s relationship with Dwight without thinking about my relationship to Rainn, which is very special to me. Rainn is a deeply soulful person. I feel deeply loved by Rainn, and I think Pam felt deeply loved by Dwight as well. They had a real bond. They really cared for one another eventually.

JENNA FISCHER: Rainn’s also like a curmudgeonly old man. He’s cranky sometimes. I remember once we were getting ready to shoot and he said, “Hold on, wait, just hold on, everybody. I have an announcement. On Mondays, you do not need to ask me how my weekend was anymore. All right? Every single person asked me how my weekend was. Just assume it was fine.”

We learned from what came before us. And we aimed to contribute something new, whether it was experimenting with comedy duos, creating a new kind of leading man, or adding another page to the playbook of cringe comedy.

We went into season four on a high note. We were a hit with audiences and critics. We had an Emmy on our shelf, not to mention awards from the Screen Actors Guild, Peabody, Writers Guild of America, Producers Guild of America, Television Critics Association, NAACP, and Teen Choice Awards. NBC picked us up for thirty episodes, so we expected a busy and productive 2007.

TITLE	DIRECTED BY	WRITTEN BY	ORIGINAL AIR DATE
“Gay Witch Hunt”	Ken Kwapis	Greg Daniels	September 21, 2006
“The Convention”	Ken Whittingham	Lee Eisenberg & Gene Stupnitsky	September 28, 2006
“The Coup”	Greg Daniels	Paul Lieberstein	October 5, 2006
“Grief Counseling”	Roger Nygard	Jennifer Celotta	October 12, 2006
“Initiation”	Randall Einhorn	B. J. Novak	October 19, 2006
“Diwali”	Miguel Arteta	Mindy Kaling	November 2, 2006
“Branch Closing”	Tucker Gates	Michael Schur	November 9, 2006
“The Merger”	Ken Whittingham	Brent Forrester	November 16, 2006
“The Convict”	Jeffrey Blitz	Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant	November 30, 2006
“A Benihana Christmas”	Harold Ramis	Jennifer Celotta	December 14, 2006
“Back from Vacation”	Julian Farino	Justin Spitzer	January 4, 2007
“Traveling Salesmen”	Greg Daniels	Michael Schur and Lee Eisenberg & Gene Stupnitsky	January 11, 2007
“The Return”	Greg Daniels	Lee Eisenberg & Gene Stupnitsky and Michael Schur	January 18, 2007
“Ben Franklin”	Randall Einhorn	Mindy Kaling	February 1, 2007
“Phyllis’ Wedding”	Ken Whittingham	Caroline Williams	February 8, 2007
“Business School”	Joss Whedon	Brent Forrester	February 15, 2007
“Cocktails”	J. J. Abrams	Paul Lieberstein	February 22, 2007
“The Negotiation”	Jeffrey Blitz	Michael Schur	April 5, 2007
“Safety Training”	Harold Ramis	B. J. Novak	April 12, 2007
“Product Recall”	Randall Einhorn	Brent Forrester & Justin Spitzer	April 26, 2007
“Women’s Appreciation”	Tucker Gates	Gene Stupnitsky & Lee Eisenberg	May 3, 2007
“Beach Games”	Harold Ramis	Jennifer Celotta & Greg Daniels	May 10, 2007
“The Job”	Ken Kwapis	Paul Lieberstein & Michael Schur	May 17, 2007

7

“Inheritors of the History of Comedy”