There are two kinds of people: those who like The Office, and those who don’t like The Office.
You could also say that there are people who don’t mind The Office, or quite like The Office but maybe wouldn’t class themselves as a die hard fan. A fourth category of person could be people who haven’t seen The Office and therefore couldn’t have a fair opinion of the show.
What am I trying to say? I don’t know, because I’m so delirious with laughter that I couldn’t put my dick on a doorknob, even if you asked me to. And I know you want me to. You sick fart. Disgusting.
There are too many classic Office moments to count: I think there’s been a rape up there!, I will not have her tunnel bandied around this office willy-nilly, He’s thrown a kettle over a pub, what have you done?, and who could forget: …get the guitar. There’s really no need to go over why The Office is brilliant. It just is.
But if you had the show on DVD, back in the pre-YouTube dark ages, when media came on plastic discs that you had to collect in order to seem cultured, you might have been treated to the outtakes, or ‘bloopers’, if you’ve been sufficiently warped by Mother America.
Outtakes are, by and large, not that hilarious. You sometimes see them tacked on to the end of middling comedy movies: actors fluffing their lines, maybe falling over or doing some kind of ironic dance. Depending on how bad the film was, they might confirm your suspicions that society has indeed reached the bottom of the well and that it’s high time you bought a gun.
But The Office outtakes are something else, aided in no small part by both the demented jackal’s howl that is Ricky Gervais’ laugh, and the concerted efforts of the man to ruin every scene he’s in. It’s no secret that this is Gervais’ M.O. and something he has derived great enjoyment from.
“[Martin] can’t stop a scene. He can’t stop a take. So if he laughs, it’s his fault,” Gervais said of a scene with Martin Freeman in the Christmas special. He loves to make the other actors laugh (he is a comedian, after all), but if he can make them spoil their own scene, all the better.
The evil genius of The Gervais Method is to slightly change the line each time. The other actor in the scene, which is more often than not poor old Martin Freeman, is expecting Gervais to say or do one thing – that’s when he strikes.
“Tim… Tim Canterbury… Archbishop of Canterbury… Bishop Muzorewa,” is a classic example – “a name I have not heard since about 1980,” Freeman explains on the DVD extras. The ability to blindside someone with a bafflingly obscure tangential reference is a gift, though not one suited to producing a TV show in an efficient manner, perhaps.
The main thing one takes away from these outtakes is, split sides and sore stomach aside, the feeling that working on sitcom must be the most fun anyone can have. Though hard work and long hours are requisite, larking about in front of the camera trying to make people laugh seems like the greatest job in the world. It probably is. If you’re Ricky Gervais, certainly.
Once you’ve devoured these, perhaps you’d like to dive into the outtakes for Extras, where you have the added bonus of seeing Ian McKellen do the least professional day’s work of his life and Patrick Stewart force Ricky to corpse uncontrollably.
Does your face hurt? My face hurts.
