Some spend their limited days on earth searching for cures to terrible diseases. Some write incredible novels or beautiful songs. Others dig through hours upon hours of American The Office episodes, carefully excavating every instance of Steve Carell’s Michael Scott giggling out a “that’s what she said” and compiling them into one monstrous video.
As with anything so repetitive, the video takes on new forms as it plays out. Like The Office itself, it’s genuinely funny at first, gently entertaining around the halfway point, and downright irritating by the end. Carell’s signature joke falls through the looking glass, becoming a parody of a parody character, laughter dying into awkward recognition of the failures of good taste until, eventually, you just feel sort of embarrassed that the whole thing is still going.
Still, anyone in the market for a retrospective of the entire The Office run (at least up until the grimmest, Michael Scott-free years) could do worse than to recap the series through one of its favorite jokes.
Thank you, official The Office US YouTube account for distilling so much of your show into one impressive little package. (That’s what she said?)