8
votes
Mindy Kaling says ‘The Office’ is ‘so inappropriate now’ and couldn’t be made today: Most characters ‘would be canceled’
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Authors
- Zack Sharf
- Published
- Dec 6 2022
- Word count
- 416 words
Unless that show made some huge changes in the latter seasons I skipped I feel like she is talking about a completely different show than the one I watched.
It also seems like they forget the kind of humor behind Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia which is still airing more than 15 years later.
The Office also aired on NBC, one of the largest broadcast networks at the time, while South Park and IASIP are on more-niche edgy cable channels (Comedy Central and FX respectively). I have 0 doubts a new "The Office" could fly on those, or a streaming platform, but I think Mindy may be right WRT big network TV.
This scene comes to mind. I've heard plenty of people start foaming at the mouth at any mention of the word 'retard,' in or out of context.
The context there is "it's funny to use the word retard" which feels pretty lazy for a joke.
That's not the context. It's more involved, and much more of a roller coaster.
The context is that Michael is receiving an HR complaint for calling Oscar "faggy" (this is the episode where it's revealed that Oscar is gay). Cue this scene where Michael is mortified because "If I knew he was gay, I wouldn't have called him that!" and then this is his like comparison.
The joke is that Michael doesn't understand the actual problem or his weird double standards, and he doesn't realize he's entirely in the wrong in not just one instance but two different ones. Every other character is aware of it. The audience is aware of it. That's basically the premise of many Office episodes. There's no joke around which specific word he used, only his complete lack of understanding and self-awareness. This episode is extra-especially about how dumb Michael is too since the entire premise is Michael struggling to be accepting of a gay coworker but having no idea how and having terrible instincts when going about it.
In retrospect, the language of this episode has aged out very quickly. But even contemporaneously, the language was already outmoded and questionable but acceptable shorthand for characters that are similarly so in terms of their understanding and perspective (another example: Bob Vance calling Michael and Stanley "a couple of Marys"). In another sense, you should expect things in older comedies (especially ones with as many episodes, and therefore opportunities, as the Office). It's easy to find moments like this in any comedy but it rarely justifies throwing out the entire thing unless the actual focus of the whole work's humour was in punching-down style humour where they actually did make fun of gays or homosexuals, and not Michael's ignorance and stupidity.
This is just the Alf Garnet defence, and it fails to acknowledge that a large part of the audience is oblivious to everything you've said, and they're just laughing at the word retard. The BBC spent years defending the Alf Garnett shows (which ran between 1965 and 1975, with follow up shows until 1992) using exactly the same reasoning you're using here, and then they did research and found that most people surveyed supported his viewpoints. Turns out that ironic racism is simply racism and it makes racists feel that they're okay.
It's also saying "intent matters", and often no it doesn't matter more than effect. And the effect is to dehumanise a group of people who already suffer terrible outcomes because of the dehumanisation they experience.
I have no idea who Alf Garnet is, and I can't find reference to any "Alf Garnet defence". I think you're talking about Poe's Law.
Here's one clip (of a full scene from what I can tell) that I found. The joke? A black guy is in the room for Alf's racist rant. The rant isn't what's funny, it's the dramatic irony of him delivering this rant without realizing there's someone of that group in the room behind him. And then he's embarrassed when he finds out—embarrassed about his racism, which is played straight but is only "funny" because he was racist in front of the group he was racist towards. There's no commentary on how bad his racism is here, only that he accidentally exposed it to a member of the group he is racist against.
This is completely different than what I described above about the Office. Alf Clausen isn't the joke, the situation is the joke. He's otherwise portrayed as a straight racist from what I can see here. Michael Scott, and the Office, are not even remotely in the same realm of humour, intent, writing, or delivery as this Alf Garnet show. Michael Scott is repeatedly shown to be caring, loving, and a completely obtuse moron. He's Homer Simpson/a dog who tries to do right the wrong way, he's not a cantankerous old racist who gets to go on long right-wing diatribes that the show then tries to say "just kidding!" over. Comedy is already hard enough to discuss because it's extremely nuanced and conditional compared to most other things, but this is a disingenuous flattening. The closest to this I can think of is the Colbert Report, and that show activated Poe's Law like little else, and yet I still anyone would reasonably argue that we should just abandon satire just in case Poe's Law happens.
Quite frankly, the difference just seems to be that this Alf Clausen show was badly written and accentuated the wrong thing, whereas the Colbert Report and the Office (US) have much higher quality writing and don't accidentally make the bigotry seem admirable. Of course there will be people who take things the wrong way (and this is more about Colbert than the Office), but we cannot let them set the "DO NOT FILL PAST LINE" mark for satire.
Further, the idea that people are only laughing at the word "retard" when the Office uses it only arises if that clip above is watched completely out of context. This is a sitcom show, and this is the second part of a single scene. Audiences are watching the whole scene, and do not have a tendency to forget scenes halfway through. It is only when people take scenes and lines, divorce them from all context, and then put them out unaccompanied that it can be taken the wrong way.
This is a pretty common occurrence with the internet and social media users it seems, who refuse to do a scrap of research. It took me, what, 30 seconds to go and find the scene on Netflix to see what the actual context of the clip was. I don't know how anyone could think the joke is using the word "retard", especially when the first half of the scene involves the word "faggy". The joke is obviously not what words are being used per se, but how Michael's behaviour is itself what is off-base. Again, this is not the same as that Alf Garnet clip above (or, from what I can read, any other moments of that character where apparently he frequently goes on long diatribes complaining about immigrants and such).
If the Office has to be taken out of context, and people have to basically lie about what the joke is by refusing to acknowledge that the context has been changed, in order for the argument to be made that the show is just as bad as a racist 70's British show (that doesn't need any such trickery to have the argument made), that speaks for itself.
But what's the solution here? We just go back and denounce all sitcoms and comedy of the past because we can take moments completely out of context and ascribe different, worse, and more problematic aspects to them? If we were to sanitize all comedy the way that this Office clip has been examined here, we would have to take every single line of a comedy out of context, examine it as it is for any possible untoward interpretations, and then excise it. What kind of product would be left at the end of this process?
This is a most elegant breakdown, and is (IMO) spot-on.
The biggest problem is that so incredibly many people don't get the joke, even if they watch every episode every time. Presuming the audience gets the joke is how things get censored and retconned quickly when they don't.
Some of the best comedy revolves around long setups and punchlines. About finding absurdity in darkness or mundane. And so many people don't find them funny.
I feel like I need proof that she's not just saying this for the attention and headlines to promote her current work before this gets deserves any more attention and time. From the video, it definitely felt like rehearsed talking points to say something inflammatory that caught even the show's hosts off guard.
I don't think that's true. You could probably dig up a very "now", woke, perfectly un-canceled youtube comedian who's doing just as "edgy" stuff today and it being fine. That's the thing about comedy: It's hard to do. If you want to do The Office style comedy, you have to do it well and be aware of the message you're sending. The Office is a work of genius because it treads that line so carefully. It's always clear who the asshole is, what the writers want to expose and make fun of. It's always clear nobody wants this to be happening in their own office environment.
That distinction is important because denying it gives ammunition to a lot of right-wing trolls who just claim to be "doing comedy" and getting upset for being canceled. All while their "comedy" is some insulting comment about a minority without any attempt to post it in a context that makes it clear it's inappropriate (probably the opposite, trying to normalize it).
In a world where biting The Onion is a global pasttime, you can never be sure that it's well-understood who the asshole is.
That said, I also think people give Chappelle too much flak, especially his Netflix specials, because they take too much out of context. I'd call him more woke (and good at his craft) than 99.99% of youtube.
The same is true of The Office. Especially the first 3 seasons, if you take 3-5 minute snippets and watch them in isolation its mortifying. After Season 2 in particular, Michael is more of a well-meaning doofus which is in somewhat stark contrast to his earlier problems.
Yea, well, IMO Chappelle is already getting a bit full of himself. I used to be a fan but it's clear he's got some thing going on where he's pissed people are calling him out on his backwards views on gender (he's comparing transgender people to wearing blackface in his Netflix special), it's plain petty and he's finding allies in questionable places.
You can do political jokes, you can do jokes on social norms (as The Office frequently does), but you have to take some responsibility for the worldview you're promoting through it. You can't just say "hey, it's just comedy, I make jokes!". I watched The Closer. Those comments weren't jokes, they were a manifesto on gender politics.
I thought for awhile about this. In the end, I think this writeup on The Closer is one of the fairest. Two choice excerpts:
And the final conclusion:
I'll leave you with a great segment from Steve Hughes, circa 2009.
It’s a similar thing with Bill Burr. Burr is a liberal guy, and if anything he could be described as pretty woke. He just makes fun of those labels and performative gestures. But because all people see is him making fun of “male feminists” they think he’s some sort of Republican. And then when Republicans actually watch his stuff they realize he’s actually a liberal, and also complain about him.
I'm reminded of when Stephen Colbert was invited to the White House Correspondants Dinner because the right wing doesn't understand satire.
Good times. He did it in-character, to Bush's face.
Most of the time, when The Office approaches sensitive issues, whoever holds a bigoted, intolerant, ignorant, or downright imbecile stance is the butt of the joke. So that's very much a show that makes fun of those that should be made fun of.
IASIP is the same thing: the joke is made at the expense of those in the wrong. The main characters are idiots and everyone knows that. But they're on FX, not NBC.
So no, The Office would not be actually inappropriate now.
However, context and nuance are casualties of our times, so in a sense, Kaling is entirely right. There's seemingly no distinction between author and character, reality and fiction anymore. The Office would not be a hit on 2020s NBC due to a change in sensibilities, but the retrospective canceling of the show would be absurd, and I don't think that's what Mindy (who wrote many stellar episodes) is aiming at.