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How The Office ruined comedy The rise of cringe humour is no laughing matter

Ricky Gervais as David Brent. Credit: IMDB

Ricky Gervais as David Brent. Credit: IMDB


July 9, 2021   5 mins

Before the first episode went out, 20 years ago today, The Office looked like just another BBC2 sitcom. Its species was still common enough in 2001. In fact, its fly-on-the-wall, “mockumentary” style seemed a little out of date, riding in on the coattails of its stablemate, John Morton’s People Like Us, which had concluded to some critical acclaim and a standard level of audience appreciation. Ricky Gervais — who wrote, directed and starred in The Office — had been associated mostly with Channel 4’s rather dodgy satire, The Eleven O’Clock Show. And the concept just seemed mundane.  There was no big idea — just ordinary people working in an ordinary place. It didn’t seem that important.

But immediately after the first episode aired, it was clear that The Office would defy these mediocre expectations. I was working in the TV industry, and I remember an unusual flurry of surprised, word-of-mouth recommendations pinging round the pre-social media internet the very next day. Gervais had taken the mockumentary genre pioneered by Morton — with no laughter track and an unseen supposed documentary camera crew — and rocket-powered it.

There were big laughs to be had in The Office, but much of its excellence was found in smaller moments located in the excruciating gap between the characters’ projected self-image and the tawdry reality. Unlike the hapless Roy Mallard of People Like Us or the often-surreal Alan Partridge, David Brent, Gervais’s character, made your entire body clench with mortifying shame. He thinks he is a cheeky barrel of fun who keeps everyone else’s spirits up. “You will never work in a place like this again,” he says. “You’ll never have another boss like me, someone who’s basically a chilled-out entertainer.” Meanwhile it’s obvious to everybody that he is weapons-grade cringe.

But we loved him. After a very shaky start, the ratings for an unusually swift repeat of the first series jumped up, and the final episode got the highest figures of Christmas 2003, now on BBC1. Then, The Office’s enormous success transformed British comedy forever. While it had always had an element of cringe, from Twelfth Night’s Malvolio to Basil Fawlty, cringe now went from being one of the side plates to being the main course. Awkwardness had to be a central feature.

For the next two decades, most of our comedy successes (with two notable exceptions) have been riffing off The Office’s template. Peep Show, The Thick Of It, Gavin and Stacey, Friday Night Dinner — they are all comedies of embarrassment and verging-on-painful unease, filmed entirely in real locations with no laughter track, and greater or lesser amounts of men’s clumsiness and gaucheness. (In fact, there’s a curious cultural disconnect between how we exhort men to open up about their emotions for the sake of their mental health, and then laugh at them when they do.)

But we have cringed too much for too long. At its best (Gavin and Stacey, Derry Girls), cringe comedy revels in the silly little ways we socialise. The terrifying pub quiz and Red Nose Day episodes of The Office set the gold standard for this. At its worst, cringe comedy is ungenerous, snarky and sneering: take the passive-aggressiveness of Louis Theroux with a guileless expression, trying to trip up one of his victims.

And this is the side that has become dominant, though also darker and snarkier to still have an impact. We are beset, today, by low-on-gags comedy-dramas, often set far from the workaday world of Wernham Hogg. The Office now looks almost sweet and innocent by comparison.

There is a weary and wearying sneer to Channel 4’s recent Back, the latest offering from Mitchell and Webb, which is almost entirely cringe and very little com. “As drearily British as Brexit!” gushed the Guardian’s five-star review, which really tells you all you need to know about this grim, wan tale of “broken masculinity”. Hi-de-Hi! it ain’t.

But British comedy wasn’t always like this. Mainstream, studio-based sitcoms with a live audience and a broad appeal were the mainstay not so very long ago, before technology fragmented society. There were hours of this stuff, good and bad, dotted around the schedules. Now, the communal, uplifting, broad belly laughs of the studio sitcom are regarded as terminally dated and naff. Tellingly, Extras, Ricky Gervais’s project after The Office, was about the cringe of making such a show — shop-floor comedy When The Whistle Blows, with its catchphrases (“Are you ‘avin a laugh?”) and stock characters (the thick one, the brainy one). Meanwhile, the astonishing ratings success of Mrs Brown’s Boys and Miranda (the notable exceptions from before) didn’t register in the zeitgeist of creatives. It’s as if their eyes can see them, and their brains register the information, but they never act on it; they never think of tailoring their output to what people actually like, rather than what they think people ought to like.

This current lack of uplifting, mass-appeal comedy has lent a curious sheen to the forgotten staples of old. I recently revisited Me And My Girl, an Eighties ITV studio sitcom about a single father and his teenage daughter. It’s the kind of uplifting, jolly fare that seemed ho-hum back then, but which now looks like a work of staggering genius: it has a lightness of touch, likeable characters, a warm heart and, crucially, lots and lots and lots of jokes, with a very high strike rate.

Unfortunately, the supposedly important, talkative demographics who hold huge sway decided such stuff was rubbish, so we chucked it. This despite the fact that nobody much is watching the supposedly important people’s programmes: the most recent Alan Partridge struggled to raise a million viewers on Friday night prime time. Prestige has become more important than getting bums on seats. Meanwhile Dad’s Army, on its zillionth repeat, is still often the highest-rated show of any kind on BBC2.

Producing a show so bouncy and cheering — light, but with just enough ballast to keep it from floating off like an untethered balloon — turned out to be a special kind of alchemy. And it has become almost impossible to recreate deliberately what had happened by accident. But, then, TV channels can only pour out of a jug what is going into the jug. Wider cultural and social changes have ripped up the desire to make populist comedies. And you can’t produce something the viewers would like to see if nobody wants to make it.

In fact, Ricky Gervais said last year that The Office would not get made today, as any kind of nuance and context is too much of a risk in the age of the Twitter mob. We forget at our peril that laughter is a vent for the release of steam under pressure.

When I started out in television in the mid-Nineties, it was a very different place. The prestige, progressive TV sector  — middle-class and socially conscious — was still boxed off, and regarded with some suspicion by executives whose main concern was snaring large audiences. You might still encounter “creatives” who didn’t have a university degree. Such people are now vanishingly rare.

The very idea that TV is primarily entertainment and diversion is now looked upon with suspicion. Something of supposed social value has to be attached. And it is nearly always the same thing, coming from the same middle-class, Remain-y place, with all its cemented doctrines, dished out as if it were the original and startlingly innovative telling of truth to power. Recently the Daleks, Inside No. 9 and even the BBC adaptation of The Pursuit Of Love gave us a good scolding for Brexit. This is not art, not even low art, but mutual masturbation.

There was always a gap between the people who make television and the people who watch it. But that has now become a chasm, as with many other areas of public life. Viewers are low-status and embarrassing. They need to be jolly well educated, whether they like it or not. The mass audience, though, can smell this stuff a mile away, and it finds something else to do. It doesn’t want to sit down after a hard day’s work only to be scolded. It’s no coincidence that the biggest TV hits — Strictly, Bake-Off, Love Island — are not trying to improve or lecture people; the dropping off in viewing figures is not solely the result of technology and the proliferation of choice.

So While The Office revolutionised TV comedy, it also ruined it. It wasn’t trying to improve us. In fact, it depended on us being a bit silly, a bit worn-out, a bit impatient with the way things are — but never all that committed to change. Just like its characters, that is. And if it were to want to make a comeback, it would have to sack off the sneer and snark, and start loving the office workers of Slough, again.


Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who.

OldRoberts953

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Matt M
Matt M
3 years ago

The only things I watched on TV last week (aside from football) were Yes Minister, The Professionals, Gideon’s Way and Rumpole of the Bailey. It would not cross my mind to try something new as I know it would be nothing but a woke lecture produced by talentless halfwits. After the England/Ukraine match when the BBC had its one chance of the year to appeal to me, they advertised a documentary about the NHS! Who in their right minds would be excited to watch that? Result: BBC switched off for another year and I check to see what’s on Talking Pictures TV.

Last edited 3 years ago by Matt M
Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago
Reply to  Matt M

Exactly this woke lecturing by talentless halfwits has killed the reboot of Doctor Who. I found it very funny indeed that the tick-box quota black actor they shoehorned in turned out to be a sex pest himself.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
3 years ago
Reply to  Matt M

I thought it must be Talking Picture.
Without in anyway gazing through rose tinted spec the the television and films produced prior to the 1980s was different and in many ways much more thoughtful and human than today’s fare. it seems back then the individuals in the industry had ambitions to deliver out put of objective merit

Al M
Al M
3 years ago
Reply to  Matt M

Yep, you only really need ITV4 (Tour de France and Minder) Quest and Talking Pictures TV. The latter recently repeated the excellent Special Branch, which was completely new to me. That series reminded me that most new TV drama is absolute tripe and seems more intent on telling you off than creating suspense.
I lasted five minutes with The Pursuit of Love. Bought the DVD of the old ITV series based on Nancy Mitford’s novels with Judi Dench and Michael Aldridge. Cheaply made, but thoroughly entertaining.

Christopher Gelber
Christopher Gelber
3 years ago
Reply to  Matt M

That’s 5 more things than I watched on TV last week. I gave TV up entirely a long while back and, honestly, have not once felt I have missed out on anything. I have Netflix and Amazon Prime and Wondrium and YouTube and podcasts galore – and geez, a day only has a few hours left when I’m not working or sleeping, and there are books and music and children and friends to attend to too. I don’t know any of the shows this piece mentions as having come after The Office, and couldn’t care less. And boy, do I save in stressballs for not being beaten over the head by the BBC and Channel 4!

Last edited 3 years ago by Christopher Gelber
Simon Denis
Simon Denis
3 years ago

Interesting. On the matter of “cringe” – it’s a social enforcement mechanism whereas real comedy is a social liberation. Cringe says, “Don’t be like him!” And since “he” – it’s never a she, let alone a she of “diverse” background – is invariably in some way unfashionable or conservative or both, the propaganda element looms large. In another article, Ed West discusses comedy, as in the Life of Brian and the way it rode on old, universal assumptions to provoke laughter. True, those assumptions could also be expressed as disapproval but laughter and disapproval are not the same thing, as the left seems to believe. In fact, they are opposite reactions to the same thing in the light of the same assumptions. Laughter forgives; laughter, ultimately, accepts. Of course, this is where the left gets really hot under the collar – if it still wears a collar (without studs, that is) – for what is there to forgive? Plenty. We all have to forgive each other because we all get on each other’s nerves. Once you’ve laughed at some form of delusion or delusive behaviour, you’ve expressed your sense that it is mistaken or ridiculous and that’s that. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the Life of Brian and humour like it came at a time of genuine relaxation. The laughter enabled the relaxation. Cringing, remember, makes us tense – and so, once again, censorious.

Stuart Rose
Stuart Rose
3 years ago
Reply to  Simon Denis

Good point about how real comedy and laughter goes hand-in-hand with forgiving and releasing anger and hostility —- at least transcending it.

D Ward
D Ward
3 years ago

Theatre has also become “too Woke to watch” – I’m not prepared to pay hard-earned money to be told I “wrong-think”. Unfortunately the people purveying this are subsidised to do so by our elected government.

Julian Farrows
Julian Farrows
3 years ago

This form of ‘moralizing’ entertainment is worse in the US. It appears not only in popular tv shows, but also in commercials and cartoons. American comedy is perhaps the worst with the likes of John Oliver and Samantha Bee. I barely watch any TV these days; when I do I feel like I’m subjecting myself to thoroughly predictable political propaganda.

Last edited 3 years ago by Julian Farrows
J Bryant
J Bryant
3 years ago

I never much liked The Office because it struck a bit too close to home. I’ve worked in dysfunctional companies with characters like David Brent. And, yes, The Office was often “ungenerous, snarky and sneering.”
Sadly, I suspect the author is right that for the foreseeable future we’ll be bombarded with moralizing TV shows and movies people don’t want to watch. I wonder how long that trend will continue? Will good old economics win out in the end and the studios will tire of producing flops? But if TV and movie producers are now irredeemably woke, who’s left to make genuinely innovative and engaging shows?
I enjoy horror and South Korea has produced many excellent movies over the past decade. Check out “The Wailing” if you’re interested. We may have to look beyond the western world, and tolerate subtitles, for our entertainment in future.

Ian Barton
Ian Barton
3 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

I suspect sources like YouTube will generate the next generation of comedies that people want to watch.
The established MSM will continue to sneer at their output – until they find that their own dreary lectures become increasingly unsaleable by comparison.

Last edited 3 years ago by Ian Barton
David Simpson
David Simpson
3 years ago
Reply to  Ian Barton

eg Comedy Unleashed on YouTube – not for the faint hearted and utterly incorrect, but laugh out loud funny mostly. Sadly off air cos of Covid at the moment, hopefully back after the great unleashing

David Simpson
David Simpson
3 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Some rather good Turkish stuff on Netflix too. I’m enjoying The Gift at the moment. And it’s a view into other quite different cultures

Prashant Kotak
Prashant Kotak
3 years ago

The same has happened to stand-up. For example, I doubt Nish Kumar has ever made an actual pun in his life, and he wouldn’t know a joke if it took a thirty yard run-up and thwacked him on the backside. Something when the least requirement to become a comedian is the ability to create actual comedy.

Al M
Al M
3 years ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

Where I live, the owner of the main comedy club is now an SNP politician. That’s beyond parody!

At least the alternative comedy lot from the 1980s rented a room from sleazy old Paul Raymond in his noodie theatre.

david.ginsberg
david.ginsberg
3 years ago

I used to love Me & My Girl as a kid, if I’m right it was London Weekend TV. they had some great programmes, the whole family would sit down to watch the 6 o’clock show every Friday.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
3 years ago

I think Friday Night Dinner is a strange programme to include in this list, as it never struck me as being particularly cringe. It seemed more like the sitcoms of old (without the canned laughter) with an eccentric dad, squabbling kids and mum getting more and more irate at the debacle that’s unfolding. I don’t think it was particularly mean or sneering towards any of the characters involved, or noticed any nudges against wrongthink or the like

Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
3 years ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Spot on.
Friday Night Dinners is the only sitcom of recent years that bears repeat watching.
The only one that bears watching in the first place, actually.
RIP Paul Ritter.

Stephen Rose
Stephen Rose
3 years ago

I rather like Friday night dinner, W1A, Motherland, Number 9,Inbetweeners,Green Wing. Family guy keeps me laughing. I go back as far as Steptoe and son, Hancock ‘s half hour, Dad’s Army, all these classics had real pathos. Fawlty Towers was on recently, a show I know off by heart and its still brilliant, pure farce.
Alan Partridge needs to be pensioned off.
Comedy production is just too graduate middle class.Always looking around for confirmation and peer approval. Comedy becomes just another form of instruction, you can hold up a mirror but there has to be some heart. I find that the belly laughs come at the expense of the white working class, This Country, King Gary, no one has a pop at the po faced authoritarians who want to run everything. They seem ripe for satire.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
3 years ago

Interesting article, but I’m not really sure why The Office is getting blamed for these cultural changes.

David Brent falls into a long tradition of English comedic characters who are pompous, prejudiced and entirely lacking in self awareness. Despite this in their own estimation, they are humane, progressive and with-it.

The other characters in the show despite their limitations are in fact depicted rather sweetly.

Last edited 3 years ago by Andrew Fisher
Tom Watson
Tom Watson
3 years ago

Did Inside No. 9 berate us for Brexit? I didn’t get that.
Assuming he’s referring to the proms episode – OK, admittedly it showed a family gathered to watch the last night of the proms killing an asylum seeker who’d wandered into their garden, and who may or may not have been literally Jesus, so on that level it doesn’t look good. BUT if I recall the brother-in-law of the Brexity, Union Jack-waving host family was a very unsympathetic caricature of the sneering superior Remoaner liberal: on top of “this is just Rocky Horror for the Classic FM set” he revealed he wsa planning to take the house all for himself and his wife when the grandfather died, because he had a DNA test to suggest the Brexity sister was actually half-German. This after his wife had, reached satisfaction on said asylum seeker in the other room and then publicly outed the husband as a homosexual. And it was the confused grandfather who actually stuck the knife in, to the horror of all present. Very far from ‘ignorant Brexit racists would probably kill Jesus if they met him because he’s brown and foreign hur hur.’
For what it’s worth, I thought it was also hinting at the beginnings of a reconciliation between the two halves of the family at the end, engendered by the shared guilt of hiding the murder, a nice (if dark) twist on the scapegoating motif that’s at the heart of the Christian story. But now I’m talking like an insufferable pseud so must leave to start commenting on the Guardian’s culture pages instead.

Dawn McD
Dawn McD
2 years ago

I tried to watch one episode of the American version of The Office, and I couldn’t believe anyone wanted to watch “cringe” comedy. It made my skin crawl. I used to watch too much TV, but now I don’t watch any. In the last year or so I saw the last few shows I was hanging on to suddenly drop off a cliff, as their scriptwriters seem to have been replaced by college sophomores with an agenda. When I think about how much my husband and I used to laugh, how many really fun shows were on TV, and how there’s nothing left, I could cry. It feels like the world is dying, or more to the point like someone evil is out there actively trying to destroy everything. We are in a war, just without any actual shooting. Yet.

Melanie Mabey
Melanie Mabey
3 years ago

The year 2000 seems to be a mile stone or tombstone on the way to neo- puritan ascendancy

Richard Scire
Richard Scire
3 years ago

I never liked the The Office, either the original or the American version. I didn’t think it was funny, rather it was just mean.
I loved Miranda and I have watched the series several times but I was dissapointed with the American version.
I’d much rather laugh than cringe!