LogFAQs > #957009746

The cringe humor is the appeal of The Office. It's just natural as someone else pointed out. Without Michael Scott, while the rest of the ensemble is funny... it kinda loses it's competitive edge over other sitcoms. It just becomes another sitcom, and even worse, I'd argue season 9 is a bad sitcom. The last few episodes are good, but I still wouldn't really call them hilarious like it was in the earlier seasons (albeit, I like series finales for giving closure and acting as a goodbye to us more than needing to be funny so I give it a pass).

Parks and Rec is a good show to me... but to me, it also was mainly a smirk or maybe a chuckle rather than me finding it really, really funny. There was a point in Parks and Rec where it honestly felt more like a feel-good show with comedy rather than a legit sitcom. The criticisms towards Michael, or even Jim and Pam make it evident that there's a large group of people that only accept stoic, snarky/suave but kind, or full-on-Dwight. If they don't fall into one of those groups, then people think that makes the show bad, despite the fact that characters that you want to root for but still find uncomfortable like Michael create a lot of unique jokes and situations. Not that those three groups are bad, I love Dwight for instance, it's just that a normal sitcom only includes those three archetypes whereas a great sitcom includes a much greater diversity.

For all the insults a character like Jim gets for being the goody-two-shoes, I think the Office unintentionally showed how Jim is a unique and great character as the "main protagonist/good guy" of the show compared to others when they brought in their own parody of him in Plop. Plop is a nice guy, one you'd expect as a main protagonist given a little more development, but he's far from a Jim. Jim actually had some spice to him, to the point where you did question if he was a bully in some ways or self-righteous in others.

Again, like Parks and Rec, but I do feel people who love that show and then come in to watch The Office and trash on it for its "annoying" characters more so than any group misunderstands that the dynamic doesn't have to be like Parks and Rec all the time. I partially blame people for heavily comparing the two as brother/sister shows, when they really have distinct tones for much of their respective series. This isn't me saying you can't dislike The Office, or that it's better than your show, and I understand this is starting to verge onto being an Office version of the Rick and Morty copypasta, but I just never understood why people are confused that people find it funny.

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