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…