One of the main reasons I stopped watching the Simpsons around seasons 9-10 was because the writers seemed to turn Homer Simpson from a bumbling moron to an unbelievable megaretard in the hopes of generating more laughs. As Homers actions became less and less believable the show became less funny.
After watching tonights hour long Office episode I think the writers are making a grave mistake by making Michael into a total buffoon. I know he’s supposed to be a dim bulb, but they are turning him into a complete ass who says and does things that nobody would ever do, yet he does repeatedly. I know it’s a comedy and there is a need to suspend my disbelief but with him being the focus of the show it is very distracting when he continues to say and do things so far out of reality that it’s not funny. Like the whole sequence about making up a god to worship or whatever. Lame.
Does anyone else understand where I am going here? I’m not very good at writing this stuff so maybe someone else can add to this.
I don’t watch The Office, but as a longtime Simpsons viewer I do know what you mean. I think it’s almost an unavoidable thing in a long-running comedy: your characters have to do things that surprise viewers in order to stay funny, so they end up doing dumber and dumber things. Shows usually get wackier over time, if they don’t start out that way. It tends to bug fans, it makes the characters less realistic and it’s generally not an improvement, but it’s hard to avoid. It happened to Arrested Development, and that show only lasted 2 1/2 years. Comedy is pretty much a game of “can you top this?” and that’s often how writers try to top themselves.
Bad comedy is a game of ‘can you top this?’. Bob Newhart managed to make great comedies with essentially the same character for decades without descending into idiotsville.
Great comedy derives from great characters. Weak comedy derives from pratfalls and poopy jokes and silly antics. Silly antics have their place, but only within a solid story framework.
Michael Scott has always been such a total moron that he’s completely unbelievable. Every single episode of the show has him do or say something that would get him fired immediately. I just try to roll with it, as that’s pretty much the only thing about the show that I don’t like.
I tried to edit that, but the site timed out while the window ended. My first sentence should say: “Michael Scott has always had moments of such total stupidity as to be completely unbelievable.”
Michael and Dwight are both unrealistically broad at times. Comey kind of requires a little bit of that, though. I don’t really believe anyone would be stupid enough to fall for the faxes from the future or think the Ben Franklin impersonator was the real Ben Franklin but I forgave those things because I laughed. Ultimately, if a comedy makes you laugh, it’s succeeding.
Yeah, sometimes it seems a wonder that Michael is able to function in the world at all.
Last season’s wedding episode was one of his worst displays of buffoonery, and tonight’s “You’re Satan” and putting animal parts together to build a god were pretty far over the top. But like Dio says, as long as it makes me laugh, I’m okay with it.
At times in tonight’s episode, I got the exact same feeling as the OP, framed in terms of the exact same analogy. In fact, it happened to me with the exact same “Create various gods out of random animal parts for no particular reason other than that this is not, on the whole, an intelligent thing to do” sequence.
Not much of a contribution to the discussion, I know, but just know that you’re not alone.
Michael’s character is the reason I don’t watch the show. I enjoy some to the relatively subtle gags and then he does a pratfall or some other over the top gag that just breaks sense of reality the humor had.
I agree with a lot of what the OP said. I don’t watch the Office, but his comments about Homer’s de-evolution and the general trend involved.
I like character’s who are capable, but flawed. One of the things about the Venture Bros. (during the time I watched it, I only saw a little bit of season two, and am waiting for the chance to get the dvd’s to catch up) that I was torn about was how they oscillated on this; sometimes Venture, Monarch, etc. had the potential to be who they were supposed to be (but poor choices or lazyness held them back), and other times they were just pathetic. I personally find the former a lot more interesting, and feel that it has much better potential both for humor, and for getting viewers to be emotionally invested in the character.
Garfield’s another one. At first, the comic had a pretty harsh, grim sense of humor. Over time, that evolved into a more light-hearted surrealist comedy (Garfield was more mischievious then cruel, and the nature of the comic had overtones of looney-toons style over-the-top absurdity). Then the comic “topped” itself not by over-exaggerating the character, but inverting the paradigm; Garfield became the butt of the joke as often as not. Finally, it fell into the mold we know today, stale one-note jokes from extremely flat abstract character. Garfield’s become such an extreme exaggerated blend of his type-1 and type-2 iterations that he’s no longer funny or appealing. It’s pertinent to this discussion because for a time, Davis was quite good at finding ways to grow and change the characters and tone to keep it new without simply trying to out-do himself ad nauseam.
Yeah, completely unbelievable characters who got more bizarre as time went by.
Even Bob Newhart’s stand up had a large bit of “can you top this?” to it.
And that’s just nitpicking the Bob Newhart throwaway, ignoring the presumptuous of the rest of the post attempting to define “bad comedy”, “great comedy” and “weak comedy”.
Michael is what initially turned me off about the Office, but the other characters kept me coming back bit by bit.
I’d contrast this episode, which I thought was terrible, with the the season ender, which was absolutely wonderful. In the season ender, you believed that Michael actually had a chance at the corporate job, and that he was trying to be decent to Jan despite the fact that his attraction to her was only based on two prominent things. The fact that he ended up trapped with her was very funny because of that, not out of buffoonishness, but because it had a little poiniency.
They do this with Dwight, too, where sometimes he is funny becuase he is a little strange and he does live in a bit of a fantasy world, but when they take him too far it ceases to be so funny. The idea of the show is the craziness in normal life, not outright zaniness, so when Micheal takes it to the realm of the unbelievable, he gets out of sync with the rest of the characters and the show suffers.
My daughter and I commented that Michael is our least favorite character on the show.
As they were doing promos of Steve Carrell’s new movie and the vid-release of his Noak’s Ark debacle, we agreed that as his body of films has grown, we didn’t think he was all that good/funny of an actor.
I think this is why The Office UK did a good thing by quitting after 2 seasons. Ricky Gervaise’s character was so over-the-top (same character as Michael) that it would have been too unbelievable - and possibly annoying - to see him go on much longer.
Michael is truly cringe-worthy through the entire episode. He’s ALWAYS been a complete and utter buffoon.
The brilliance of the Michael Scott character is that 97% of the time, he’s so over-the-top (“You look exotic, is your dad a GI?”) and embarrassing, yet 3% of the time he’s a genuinely good human being who does important things for people in the office.
I think there’s a subtle distinction, though. He’s always been a cringe-worthy idiot, but he’s stayed within some wierd logical boundaries that he set for himself. The boundaries gave him a lot of leeway to be an ass, but now the boundaries have disappeared. He’s verging on cartoonland now, at the point where he’ll fight a mechanical chicken or have long conversations with a dog, or conceive a toddler who speaks with a snooty accent. In cartoons, anything but anything can happen, no matter how idiotic. That’s where Michael’s headed, it seems.
It’s funny that many viewers in the US preferred the American version of The Office to the English original because they found Michael Scott more beliveable than David Brent. At least he made sales, whereas David had no obvious qualifications.
For real comedy, however, check out the Quebec version – La Job. The boss, played by Antoine Vézina, does a spot-on imitation of Ricky Gervais. It’s really the only highlight of La Job, as the other characters are pretty lame.
Right, but Dwight thought he might be the real Ben time traveling and was trying to catch him in a lie (asking him about the historical Ben Franklin). I think it included him saying “I’m 90% sure that’s not the real Ben Franklin” or something ridiculous like that.
As far as the OP, I agree this episode was weak (but most of the hour-long ones seem to be - season finale excluded). I’m not sure it was entirely Michael though - all of the characters did things that seem a bit "outside’ their normal bounds. I didn’t really buy that Dwight killed the cat and was going to “unplug” Meridith. Andy’s nipple tape was just ridiculous, and IMO, stupid. Only Pam and Jim (and by extension Kevin and Oscar) rang true for me.