Uncontrollable Laughter 2

I found Literature and Civilization II extremely interesting because we focused on something that we took for granted every day. Laughter is a huge part of my life and honestly, I find that a person’s sense of humor directly relates to their personality. However, I never gave much thought to why I laugh at specific things when other people do not find them funny. I just assumed it was some random function of the brain and too complex for me to understand. The class taught me that humor truly is complex because so much of it depends on culture and our perceptions of the world, but there are basic reasons or theories as to why humans laugh. Now that I have taken the class, whenever I laugh I always try to relate it back to some theory or try to figure out why I actually think that it is funny. I have realized that I laugh at some things because others are laughing, but I do not truly think they are funny. I have also grown to truly appreciate some of the things that I think are extremely funny. One of those things would the television show The Office. When I kept trying to find a time that I laughed uncontrollably, my mind kept going back to any time I watched an episode of The Office, so I decided to cave and write about why I think The Office is my favorite TV show. 

If you know me well, you would probably know that I hold a deep obsession for The Office. I started watching the television show in middle school and I have probably seen every episode at least four times. Keep in mind that there are 201 episodes of the office. That is roughly 308 hours of my life dedicated to this show. It is the only show that I can re-watch episodes and still laugh out loud and the only show where I balled like a baby during the finale. Now that I have established my obsession of the show in it, let me tell you what this class has taught me about my love for an office with just fifteen main characters.

            
Most television shows include people with extravagant and complex lives that as an ordinary person, I find really hard to relate to. The Office, however, is a show that documents the lives of about fifteen ordinary people who work in a paper distributor office. It cannot get more ordinary than that. The Office’s premise is the sarcasm of ordinary life. It takes people with basic lives, but with weird quirks and exaggerates how people live ordinarily. Although I have never worked in an office, I still found a lot of the sarcasm hilarious and relateable. A lot of the people think Michael Scott, the boss of the office, has very sexist and racist jokes. I agree that his jokes definitely have that undertone, but that The Office executes them in a way that sarcastically pokes fun at idiot people who make those jokes in real life because we all know someone who finds offensive things funny. No one in the office agrees with Michael’s jokes and in fact most of jokes offend someone in the office, so by exaggerating his actions they sarcastically portray a person people often hate being around.

 Ask me who my favorite character in The Office is and I will probably never give you a straight answer because I would honestly feel bad for not naming one of the characters as my favorite. If my life depended on who my favorite character is, however, I would have to choose Jim. Out of everyone in the office, Jim would probably be the most normal. He is the one who falls for the receptionist, Pam, plays constant pranks on his desk mate, Dwight, and is known as the “attractive” one in the office with nothing going for him. Jim’s normalcy makes everyone else seem like a complete wackjob in The Office. He is what you would call a fish out of water. By being the normal person in The Office who always tries to do the right thing, everyone’s quirks and annoyances are highlighted and even more humorous. Jim is known for that stare into the camera with a little shake of his head when someone does something ridiculous making the ridiculous thing even way funnier. When his eccentric coworkers put him into uncomfortable situations, his reactions and how he deals with them make the show because we can all relate to being the normal one, even if we are the eccentric one. Overall, The Office is a show that makes you fall in love with every character no matter how annoying they can be. I followed their lives to the end and saw a piece of myself in every single one of them. Yes, I cry at the last scene where they all come back to The Office for one final time, but that is because every character taught me some sort of lesson during the 201 episodes. It will forever be favorite show.