Mergers and Repetitions

S2E1 of The Office and a joke that’s not funny any more

This piece is part of a series on The Office (UK), running up to the 20th anniversary of its finale this Christmas. Don’t miss out by following me on Medium.

Comedy is all in the

timing. And the delibery. But as important as both are, they’re not absolutes, something proved by the converse effects repetition can have on the same joke. Immediately repeat even a good one to your audience and you’ll lose the credit you’d gained. And when you’re badgered to tell a new arrival “what you just told me!” it’s still hard to wring out many more laughs, hard to fake the serendipity that is delivery and timing coincided well.

But, as I wrote here, there’s absurdist humour to be found in repetition ad absurdum. In these cases the repetition is the joke.

Repeated jokes of different types comprise the first episode of The Office’s second series. In the world of its story, they start as not so funny and get worse; but at the audience-level, when put in perspective - that is, at an ironic distance - by Gervais/Merchant, they start well and get better and better.

Native American Wisdom

First, repetition as quotation with The Office’s first cold open. Gareth breaks the workaday background hum by singing ‘Mahna Mahna’; an approving Ben joins in with the refrain “Mahna Mahna, doo do-do doo”; and just when the song seems to have wrapped up, David Brent makes his bow with the bridge back to the refrain, accompanied with Kermit-like arm dancing. Tim watches, phasing between bemusement and amusement, then David names what he and the audience might think: “Muppets.”

Shortly after, David quotes a less renowned puppet, from a British ad campaign of the time co-starring sweet scruff Johnny Vegas (alt-universe Samwise Gamgee) and a [Lancashire accent] “Monkey!”; other impressions he flaunts for the cameras include Columbo and Basil Fawlty.¹ These he repeats to salvage a rocky welcome speech for new staff from Swindon, throwing in John Cleese’s goose-step for bad measure (like Jack Black in Community, Brent’s surprisingly limber for a stocky guy). Though he insists the Two Ronnies bit he quotes is “a classic”, the staff are stumped. And when all else fails he does an impression of erstwhile king of British TV comedy Harry Enfield and his father-in-law character’s “Only me!” Another innovation of The Office: catchphrases shorn of studio laughter. They aren’t funny — and that’s what’s funny.

Quotation is delayed repetition; David also does the immediate kind. Pre-speech, he skates along the circles of conversation, loser at his own party, trying to break in with a sarcastic “Dawn, you know I don’t drink!” No one notices, so he repeats: “She gave me some wine and I went, ‘You know I don’t drink!’” This itself is a repetition of a similar moment from the last series opener, when Dawn muttered about David drinking every lunchtime. Back then he bristled; now he leans into it: “Do you not drink?” asks a new colleague. Snorting Brent to an existing colleague: “He says, ‘Do I not drink?’” (The latter replies wearily, with exquisite delivery: “He drinks.”)

Do Not Accept Cookies

Gareth too is on repeat. Armed with a new “portable phone”, he makes a loud social call to Oggie (“Oi! Oi! Oi!”— for non UK-readers that’s one of the more inane call-and-response chants from the sports terraces, though people’ll do it in karaoke pubs as well before their song like the self-intro at an AA Meeting (‘My name’s Sandra and I’m a numpty.’) Gareth’s mention of Oggie here repeats the same from the last series opener. Meanwhile on his desk is a new gimmick, a new repetitive toy.

He’s topped the office’s Big Mouth Billy Bass (beloved of Tony Soprano and Queen Elizabeth II) with an Americanesque ‘cookie jar’ in the form of a cop. Every time you open it tells you to stop and move away.

Gareth triggers this warning first for an unimpressed Tim; then a second time for a delighted David; and then David makes him do it again. Three times the cookie jar crows. But who or what is David in denial about?

Does anyone know who Eric Hitchmo is?

While David made Gareth repeat a joke, Gareth tries to make David do so too, only for him to squirm.

It’s towards the end of his welcome speech, one which began with him already corpsing, tongue thick with suppressed laughs. Really it isn’t a speech, more a series of tenuously relevant jokes. After each one has slammed into the ground he resorts to doing an impression he’d already done for the cameras, of a certain Eric. Hitchmo, co-ordinator of the Coventry Conference.

He’d claimed he used to mock the man’s adage “I don’t agree with that in the workplace” by quoting it in various TV character styles, and not anything “vicious” like mocking his withered hand (of which Gervais does a perfect mime). But after these TV stylings go unrecognised by his staff — one says “He doesn’t sound like that” - David becomes infuriated and appeals to Gareth. But Gareth says he prefers the stuff he does about Eric Hitchmo’s “wanking claw.” Eyes darting to the camera as though checking it didn’t notice, David denies knowing what Gareth means.²

Twenty Questions, Two Queens

Gareth complained in the last episode about “foreigners, women or the disabled” taking advantage. Now all three have come to haunt the English able-bodied men of the office.

A wheelchair-user, Brenda, has joined the branch (and joined ranks with the never-seen Anton, the forklift driver with dwarfism). Her reception is to have David ask others, “Have you all met this little lady” before giving her a toy-man bow. (As the series progresses David’s always wheeling her out of the way without permission.) Female staff in general remain shaky ground for David. He tries to bro it out with his new boss Neil by saying of his old boss Jennifer “Some of them can be a little bit sensitive”. When the comment obviously gets no purchase he clarifies ‘them’ means people. But most maladjusted to is Oliver, the new and only non-white man in the office, and an authority to appeal to about racism.

In the last episode David consoled Gareth - crying at the prospect of him leaving - that he should try have the Blitz spirit of The Dambusters, a film that has a black dog with an infamous name. Gareth says it twice while David tries shooing him from doing so in front of the cameras, though he then provides cover with his stupidity-nailing line, “It was the 40s, before racism was bad.” Now it’s the 2000s, and it is. Not so much that Gareth didn’t euphemise the dog’s name, but enough that he sighs at his dad for not keeping up with “trendy words” and saying “darkies instead of coloureds.”

The disputed racism in this episode is Gareth’s joke about the Royal family playing Twenty Questions. Camilla, future Queen, is ‘it’ and thinking of “a black man’s cock.” (“Trust Camilla” David amusingly/pointlessly adds). The punchline is Queen Elizabeth guessing the answer in two. David’s guffaw at the punchline is delayed just right to be realistic.

A fan of the joke, he resorts to it with a small group of staff following the failure of his welcome speech. He’d already claimed ownership, reminding Gareth “That’s the sort of stuff I write,” before putting him down: “You didn’t write it, you just told it”. He goes on to just tell it himself.

Or not quite. Before he can get to the words “a black man” he summons one in Oliver. His panicked reaction is to cut off the joke and pretend that’s how it ends.³ (Another fresh discovery on the show’s part: finding the humour in jokes minus their punchlines.) Fortunately Oliver’s heard this one and completes the joke and gives it his go-ahead, to which David gives a perfect patronising “Well done” squint-and-point.

This leads to the another example of the episode’s repetitions: bollockings. Firstly, David gets called into his office by Neil and Jennifer, who tell him there’s been a complaint and make him repeat the joke. There’s a lot to be mined from David’s protest, “Won’t be funny now, will it?” Jokes repeated so close to their first telling rarely are; unless they’re housed in a funnier context, such as two characters like David and Gareth being made to repeat one under duress. David tells the third repetition now of the Twenty Questions joke. And despite his misgiving, he and Gareth do still find it funny, tittering like schoolboys. In fact David explains Gareth’s laughter as being the very result of repetition: “He’s heard it before”.

Jennifer and Neil make the case why the joke isn’t funny —it reinforces the stereotype that black men have big cocks, and that (more of a stretch) it’s “their only achievement”. David’s defence echoes the one he made of women with big boobs in S1E2, that they shouldn’t be punished, and Gareth’s “if anything they should be rewarded.” Likewise, black men “shouldn’t be ashamed.” (Gareth telling Jennifer he could show her magazines that prove the stereotype true (“Could you?” she asks, which Gareth misreads as non-rhetorical) also harks back to his message from Taffy to David that he had another of his “funny videos.”) Their defences fail to convince, at which point David dobs in Gareth like they’re at the headmaster’s office.

The gaffe is made worse when David brings up in front of Jennifer and Oliver that the man liked the joke. After she’s left, David sets off a faux-pas domino run, saying she should chill out, which reminds him of “ganja”, which he says Oliver would know about, which leads to a mention of munchies (“munchie city” being where he’ll warn himself off in three episodes time). This in turn leads to a repeat bollocking for David, now for “advocating the use of drugs.”

He protests he was proving he “can communicate with people from all walks of life.” (“I’m mad enough without the gear” he’ll later say with a wink at his fellow management trainers smoking weed that he says is “partially decriminalised anyway, at last.”) To prove that, he makes a second speech to staff. Though he starts with his conciliatory disappointment that the offended persons didn’t come to him first, he then tells them they’ve misinterpreted his jokes.

The Geordie woman among them, Trudy, points out you don’t have to be black to be offended by them, not least when Oliver is the “only one black guy here”. David counters that “an Indian fella used to work here”, Sanj, who gets woven into this episode from his brief appearance in Episode 1. (Even so this back-and-forth begins the beef between Trudy and David.)

He and Gareth haggle the ideal diversity of the workplace down to “half and half”, as David says Oliver is (“I’m mixed race”), then he concludes by merging his fingers to signify a racial melting pot. “The Swindon lot” are not soothed.

Do you know what ‘nemesis’ means?

They did bring back-up with them however: Neil.

He’s not just Jennifer’s replacement; he makes sure to tell the cameras “I’m David’s boss”. David was able to patronise a female one but a male one is too close to himself. Neil is his ego ideal and as such must be repelled for proving him all ideal and no ego. He’s handsome, charming, he gives the staff a well-judged jokey speech, which dunks on Slough for being worse than Beirut, gets away with a gay double entendre, and impugns David’s managerial efforts. David follows up with his versions of these jokes but in his case they get a smattering of laughs then fewer. He’s shook: “Oh come on. You try something…” Neil awkwardly thanks David and he makes the distracted question sound “Urgh?”

Is he so easily shook because in the last episode he failed a medical and so lost a promotion? What’s more, lost the promotion to the man who’s now his boss?…

Or maybe Neil shot first. When he enters the episode, David says they met at the Ipswich conference, where he was “a leetle bit drunk,” to which Neil adds, “For most of the week.” David doesn’t snap back as he did at Dawn, but neither does he josh along like he’ll do about the wine at the welcome party.

True, David vainly/insecurely slips Neil a copy of the trade magazine ‘Inside Paper’ on whose cover he appeared, and which he’d showed a passing colleague towards the start of the episode. But Neil points out that David looks young in the picture. A cowed David insists it was only 18 months ago and that he’d only got out the magazine to put it “inside the paper bin”, though not without feeling “It’s a shame.”

Remember, each time Neil catches David out is caught on camera, as Neil knows, and so each is doubly worse. Neil had given the impression during his speech of being a decent sort, the Actually Good boss, firm-but-fair-but-fun. Really he’s one of the show’s covert villains. Deep-down, with his churchy triumphal name, Neil Godwin is a smug prig.

But David won’t stayed cowed by him. Seeing Neil double-cheek-kiss Jennifer, he mutters, “Kisses everyone, means less.” He blames his speech’s failure on Neil for not warming the crowd up, being an amateur to David’s professional. To Neil’s face he starts his series-long attempt at retaliatory emasculation. After repeating his “as an actor/actress said to a bishop” line he assumes Neil is gay (which, had it been true, would’ve helped him readjust their status). He then proceeds once again to put all feet in his mouth, averring that the one-out-of-ten ratio of gay people in the population “seems a bit high”, then telling Neil to keep it “legal and safe” — your typical conservative concern-trolling stance on homosexuals. But the retaliations aren’t enough. Before his second speech the documentary crew spy through his blinds the first of many sad solo ponders.

Repeating the same mistakes

Two characters trying not to repeat things this episode are Tim and Dawn, in their separate, and not entirely nice ways.

In the last episode Tim had told Dawn his old job was now up for grabs. But she hasn’t taken it; David explains he let go of Karen, his secretary of a few weeks, what with the redundancies of the last series and since Dawn “can do a lot of it anyway.”

Tim himself is now Senior Sales Rep, a meaningful change unlike the milk monitor job title of Team Leader Gareth (for non-UK readers, schools here used to give kids milk in the morning, supervised by ‘milk monitors’, till ‘Marget Thatcher Milk-Snatcher’ brought an end to the policy). As well as actual more pay and responsibilities, the new job’s given Tim a new attitude.

Lee, who in the last episode pranked Tim with a fake ‘You looking at my bird?’ confrontation, is now told off by Tim for lurking behind front desk with Dawn when “top brass are milling about”. He pertly tells her he’s busier these days then talks over her asking whether he laughed by telling her to get the phone. And at the party he grabs her attention only to remind her that she’s been off the phones for an hour

This severity is him asserting the professional-only nature of their relationship ever since his exposed crush. His romantic attentions he switches to new intake from Swindon, Rachel. They have their own naturalistic dialogue-tangle when he asks about her ‘Pop the Pink’ t-shirt, a snooker reference, though the men aren’t wrong in seeing it, and its follow-up in the next episode ‘Fallen Angel’, as risqué. Men like Keith, who introduces himself by intoning his name, and Gareth, who again says what he sees and hears - “Snacks… Saturday” - before just as thuddingly asking Rachel whether she has a boyfriend, when all the while Tim had been probing more subtly. In any case Gareth uses the sign of fingers pointing from his eyes to her to plant a pre-emptive flag.

Tim’ll still get their first. Before he does he hurts Dawn in a more insidious way. She too tries to repeat a joke, specifically to get Tim to join her in winding up Gareth by pretending he’s gay. How far Tim’s fallen that he defends a busy Gareth from her, then tells her he’s busy too, as she should be. For him to scold her via the joke that used to be ‘their thing’ is the peak of his betrayal.

Thankfully he feels bad straightaway, and, perhaps given Dutch conscience by the welcome party wine, he tells Dawn he has a 20 minute window to wind up Gareth. Dawn looks heartbreakingly relieved.

Back in each other’s good books, and giddily aghast at David’s cack-handed racial kumbuyas, Tim and Dawn dance (at last, having conspicuously not done so in the previous episode). But now Lee gets his revenge, and no longer as a pointed prank: he shoves Tim against a cupboard. Tim brushes off being unmanned in front of colleagues and the viewing public with a grimace and shrug, while Dawn hurries to find Lee.

The previous episode ended with Tim alone at his desk; Gervais/Merchant pair that shot with this episode’s closing one: Dawn, minus Lee, minus anyone, tidying up the party’s cheese-and-pineapple sticks.

It’s a final repetition, this time of the stereotypical British crap party snack, now gone in the bin. Some repeated patterns, clichés, stereotypes can be binned; some can be refreshed by irony; and some broken out of. You just need to stoke the pressure, as Dawn and David are going to find out.

For more about The Office follow me here on Medium or subscribe to my Substack, Artless. You can also buy my novel The Prick and its limited edition tie-in The Pricklet.

[1] When David is asked who he’d most like a dinner with he says Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama and Rory Bremner, the impressionist.

[2] In a couple of episodes time David will mention an Andy Hitchcock — “Cockles, Cocky, Big Cock” — saying to ask whether he got the grass stains out of his trousers, “though not in front of his wife.” Then he does Gervais’s best lurching ‘oh shit’ glance at the camera. David is constantly performing whether it’s for the cameras or for others. It’s a clever way to show that he equates cameras to people; it’s all just audience, hence why he momentarily forgets the camera and says a secret for laughs to others in front of it.

[3] While I was in one job, I used to watch a sitcom on TV over breakfast before heading out. But I’d have to head out right at the mid-episode ad break. This meant that as far as I was concerned each plot was never resolved. Instead of neat complete 30-minute episodes of a sitcom, I was watching a series of 15-minute abrupt modernist plays, with the same characters constantly, creepily avoiding any mention of what’d happened and been left hanging last time.