The Office is truly an iconic show that inspired a new generation of pop-culture sitcoms that abandoned relying on punchline jokes for the main source of comedy, and rather uses dry humor and interview-like scenes with the main characters, allowing the audience to gain more intimate perspectives on them and their feelings. Instead of relying on punch-line oriented humor, the audience often relates and finds humor within the character's reactions, highly zoomed in upon during their interview like shots. Sonali makes the argument that The Office relies predominantly on incongruity theory and I completely agree. Michael Scott often makes comments and behaves in wildly inappropriate ways that working professionals would not deem suitable for the environment. Sonali also pointed out that the characters often react to certain situations with comments or actions, like Kevin attempting to raid the vending machine during a fire drill, that are incongruous with the scenario. I also believe that superiority theory is heavily used within the series as audience members watch Michael Scott fail to be professional and fall short with most of his own personal humor. In one episode, Michael challenges the shipping workers to a game of basketball and convinces a few of his co-workers to be on his team. The vast majority of the episode is spent on Michael building up his skills at the sport and his need for the office team to be superior to the shipping team. Not only does Michael make extremely racist assumptions about his co-workers and their basketball abilities, but Michael himself is horrendous at basketball and ultimately makes a fool of himself during the game. This example demonstrates superiority theory being utilized within the show as the audience finds the lack of skill Michael has to be the main source of humor, and his stereotypical, racist assumption that Stanley will be "naturally" good at the sport. However, after the game, which the office team would have lost if Michael did not call a false fowl on the shipping team, it is revealed that Stanley is in fact very unskilled in basketball and some of the other co-workers are pretty talented. Overall The Office is humorous because the audience relates to reactions of the characters and their overall relationship with each other.
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I agree that incongruity is the type of humor that is most often used throughout the show, but I think that the other theories also play a big part in The Office. The basketball episode is great. My favorite part is when Michael heaves an overhanded, half-court shot that misses for obvious reasons and then he yells "what's wrong with me today?! I usually make those!"
ReplyDeleteI wonder if this is a case where incongruity might have a stronger explanatory power than benign violation. Michael Scott's violations are often hardly benign, and we laugh maybe because that's all we can do. Superiority might play a role here in explaining why we feel relief and laughter and not anger or horror.
ReplyDeleteI really like that you used another example from the show that shows the use of superiority theory to show how The Office uses many different types of humor to reach an even broader audience. Additionally, I agree with your last statement about how The Office is so funny because people can relate to the show and apply it to situations they have been in too.
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