At its heart, The Office is about a man entering his middle years, desperate to be loved by everyone, convinced he has something new and original to say but, when asked to perform, can only summon the most hackneyed, racist, sexist and ableist jokes, and ordinary, well-worn cliches. The irony and therefore the comedy comes from his lack of self-awareness. The pathos comes as we watch his dream fracture, then explode. Having binge watched both series and the two-part Christmas special over the last two nights, the only difference between Ricky Gervais and David Brent is that pathos. A lot of what David Brent is to himself, a lot of what supplied the ‘cringe’ seems to be from Gervais. Gervais is what happens when Brent’s skin thin material works and Brent gets his wish.
I went back to The Office because I watched a review of After Life where the reviewer spent a lot of time asking, with incredulity, ‘Am I the only one who thinks After Life is crap?’ No, chap you’re not.
When I watched the first series of After Life, I told C that, as it’s a Ricky Gervais comedy, what we’d see is a parade of excruciating crude and crass comedic scenes, followed by scenes of saccharine sentimentality. And that’s exactly what you get. In The Office, where a lot of the humour comes from an ironic conflict between what Brent says, what he believes and how he is perceived. He lacks the vocabulary to explain what he feels so uses derogatory terms. He lacks the confidence in himself to treat women as equals, so inadvertently treats them as objects to their faces. Between the 90s, when The Office was on TV, to now, all of that irony has burned away. David Brent is wrong – about how the world sees him and how he sees the world – and so it is possible to laugh at him, but still connect with the character. When I first watched The Office, and Brent crashing through it, oblivious that he was a figure of funny, I had the sense of ‘there by the grace of god go I’. Brent is a tragic hero, a man damned or redeemed by the quality of his own soul.
After Life’s Andy is a man we are meant to admire. The ironic distance has gone. As an audience, we are meant to be on his side. But what made us, reluctantly, side with Brent, that relatable conflict has gone, replaced with a dead wife. Andy acts how he wants and is excused because of his grief. Stephen Fry was once asked what the difference between British and US comedy is. He put it very succinctly – that the British comedic character is an everyman, full of faults that put him at odds with the world; meanwhile, the American is the always the smartest person in the room. Gervais’s Andy is an American hero put in a British scenario. The British comedic character, as much as they struggle, no matter how unpleasant they are, always get their comeuppance, even if this is just the life that they are thrown into. The American always wins. That means there’s nothing behind Andy. I can feel sorry for him — he clearly loved his wife. But, he is unpleasant – he enables the death of a drug addict and threatens a child with a hammer – and effectively gets away with it. These are, maybe, actions that a British-style comedic character could get away with, because we know that these actions have repercussions; that these are the actions of someone who is psychically unravelling. Although, this would be a stretch even. There’s something sour and beyond the pale in both these acts; a distinct lack of compassion or proportion. Even so, the American comedic hero always wins, is always the best/cleverest person in the room, so Andy gets away with every vile act he performs.
I think, looking at how crass and, really I suppose, vicious Andy is compared to Brent, it comes down to forgetting where the joke is. In The Office, that extra ‘s’ added to ‘disabled’ isn’t funny in itself, it’s that the slip, the inattention, speaks to Brent’s deficits. Brent is the joke, not the word. It seems now, that this gap has closed and the word ‘disableds’ is the actual joke: look I said something that people don’t like. When the irony door slams shut, it doesn’t matter if you believe the things you say or not, once the epithet becomes the joke your joke is the same as the ones you satirised before as coming from a woeful, ignorant place. Brent means well, but messes up. He sees a world of popularity, friendship, love that he is desperate to join but can’t. Andy is a misanthrope and uses his personal experience to show how he really feels about the world. He managed to find one person that he liked, and no matter how kindly he is treated by everyone else, he does not reciprocate and so they must be punished. Both Brent and Andy say things that have such a through line that they also seem to be things that Gervais also believes – especially Andy, who uses a lot of jokes that Gervais set up for him in other shows and his standup. And that’s fine, but with the ironic door firmly shut, and nails driven into it, the straightforwardness of After Life, its lack of nuance, just makes it bad.
Because the nuance of The Office is sublime. Watching it again, it seems that Brent might have had a mental breakdown fairly recently. In episode 1, series 1, a character mentions that he had a breakdown and Brent firmly dismisses it. His chosen charity is MenCap, which focuses on mental health. Also, his previous accolades – the write up in In Paper, the recommendation to the company that does those business talks – suggest he was a good boss. He’s obviously thought of highly in the company, as he’s the Board’s first choice to be the UK Manager. The Office suggests that the worse thing that could ever happen to David Brent is that he be given a platform; that TV might just tear him apart. And, it does. Everything that Brent does on camera is because he is aware that he is being filmed. Without the documentary, would Brent have spiralled down? No, probably not. The best part of The Office, remains the subplot about Tim and Dawn, which would have happened if they were being filmed or not. So much of The Office’s heart rests in that small, stumbling romance. It is interesting to think that Dawn only returns for the Christmas party because the TV production company pays. Here, TV actually helps, and the couple get a fulfilling narrative arc, which they wouldn’t have if their ‘reality’ played out without the cameras there.
After Life misses that subplot. Scenes are either comedic or sad. The relationship between Dawn and Tim is both — their constant teasing of Gareth becomes part of the slow seduction of each other and is a way to bond. There’s nothing like that in After Life, which seems to reflect Gervais’ public persona, with no interplay between his desire to throw caustic acid over somethings and burn them down and others to treat with such seriousness and earnestness that any hint of humour would be seen as anathema. So, you end up with these silos between which no humour or pathos is allowed to flow. And without that nuance or irony, you’re left with this one-dimensional thing where all it seems to say about the human experience is that it’s sad when a loved one dies and people you disagree with, or even people who try to help, should be treated with the utmost contempt, unless they’re Penelope Wilton on a bench.
These 1320 words are greatly indebted to two YouTubers who the algorithms threw up and made me realise I wasn’t the only one who thinks After Life is a terrible show and that The Office was actually brilliant.
See some of their work, here:
Last Train of Thought 