"The Office" is a hilarious show full of incongruous moments. The example used in this paper of the opening scene of the episode "Stress Relief" is an excellent example of the classic crazy humor of the office, where every character and situation is exaggerated and always results in hilarity, especially in the characters of Dwight, who is the one who causes a fire in the office because noon paid attention to his safety presentation, and Micheal, who is seen in this scene yelling at everyone to "STAY CALM", and then proceed to throw a projector out of a window. It would now be expected for people to do this kind of things, so seeing it play out is hilarious and incongruous.
"The Office" often knows how to make the exceedingly awkward and chaotic hilarious through the use of incongruity and relief humor. Many times while a character is doing something incongruous, such as Micheal making one of his infamous "that's what she said" jokes at a terrible time again, it is funny on its own, but it is heightened by things like Jim looking at the camera to break the tension, resulting in an awkward situation becoming funny though Jim's looks at the camera. In this situation, relief humor is used to break tension during an incongruous situation in order to add to the humor of the moment, which may not be as funny without Jim's look at the camera.
This marriage of relief humor to relieve incongruous and "cringy" moments is one way that "The Office" makes people laugh everytime over and over again. In this show, the characters, such as Dwight starting the fire, are given larger than life personalities in order to cause this kind of moments to happen, where something that would be very scary and serious in real life is made into a joke by the characters actions and reactions to the world around them.
"The Office" often knows how to make the exceedingly awkward and chaotic hilarious through the use of incongruity and relief humor. Many times while a character is doing something incongruous, such as Micheal making one of his infamous "that's what she said" jokes at a terrible time again, it is funny on its own, but it is heightened by things like Jim looking at the camera to break the tension, resulting in an awkward situation becoming funny though Jim's looks at the camera. In this situation, relief humor is used to break tension during an incongruous situation in order to add to the humor of the moment, which may not be as funny without Jim's look at the camera.
This marriage of relief humor to relieve incongruous and "cringy" moments is one way that "The Office" makes people laugh everytime over and over again. In this show, the characters, such as Dwight starting the fire, are given larger than life personalities in order to cause this kind of moments to happen, where something that would be very scary and serious in real life is made into a joke by the characters actions and reactions to the world around them.
I think you are exactly right that we can think of the show as being a classic example of awkward, tense, or cringeworthy humor. This suggests thinking about relief in a slightly different way from the Freudian model--here we could think of it more as cutting tension, and not so much relieving a hidden desire. Freud might be wrong that the dirtier the joke, the funnier it is, but he is not wrong that laughter is often stronger when a situation is more awkward and the laughter provides more of a break from that.
ReplyDeleteVery good examples of the theories of humor, as well as a great analysis of the show and its use of comedy!
ReplyDeleteI definitley agree on the comments you made about relief humor. Maybe I should have expanded on relief theory in my lead blog post.
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