Where is Gareth?

For so long I have not been able to elaborate on why I considered The Office UK as a masterpiece. Of course, we do not need to explain everything we feel, otherwise, art would be boring and love would just be a combination of chemistry and biology. Masterpieces are masterpieces because they always give us different ways of interpretation being unique and artistically revolutionary.

A masterpiece is not created just by the artist; the viewer is part of this process, as he gives shared meaning to the artwork. It is not about right and wrong or some dual logical interpretation. It is about being human. Comedies, sometimes, are not taken into account as works of deep human analysis with complex and meaningful characters. Unfortunately, for so long, we had this mainstream idea that sadness is correlated to wisdom. If some thought did not come through pain, tragedy, fastening or hard work we tend to consider that it cannot be good, subconsciously, we associate wisdom with tribulation as if hard moments and painful feelings could lead us to some prize in the happy ending.

The Office is a sitcom made for TV; it is not even a movie! But it is one of the best works to understand western contemporary society. It is an epic comedy about a man trying to fit in a new era. The structural bias of the main character is among the headlines of the comedy – instead of making humour about minorities taking a lift in people’s hidden prejudice; The Office goes in the opposite direction.

David Brent is racist, homophobic and sustains a macho culture, but he tries all the time to fight against it in a very flawed way to gain the respect of his employees and the general manager. It is a Quixotesque battle to fit in a world where women are bosses and offices are multicultural.

This new world is much better than the old one, a world were jokes about someone’s ethnicity don’t make any sense anymore, not just because it is cruel in itself and condemned morally, but mainly because it is not funny, it is not clever humour, it just shows that those who like this kind of stuff live in a haunted world with narrowed minds.

When David thinks that people do not like a joke because it was misogynist or racist and tries to improvise some sort of apology, actually, most of the time, his co-workers just show pity for him – it is more than disapproval, it is pity. The Office is about a lot of people trying to give some meaning to a job that does not have any. It shows us how we are all losing our time for some values and structures that do not make sense anymore in our modern day’s society.

We could spend plenty of time exploring all the specificities and individual personalities of each character. But four, in particular, are truly representative of the clash between the new and the old times. Gareth has been a conscript and tries to impress everybody because of that but no one cares – he is young but lives in the past where soldiers were heroes. Dawn is in a relationship with Lee even though she loves Tim. Lee is the typical hard-working man with bad manners being a ‘machist’ who likes to drink beer and tries to be a model father in a model family. Tim is quite the opposite, with sarcastic humour, he doesn’t really care about his job even being the most talented worker; he is shy and struggle to declare what he feels. Dawn needs to decide if she is going to try out a new possibility or just stay in an immutable reality where she cannot be an artist.

It was in 2001 when the show was first released on BBC. Today, almost 20 years later, we are experiencing the backlash of those who did not fit in a world where minorities do not accept the crumbs anymore.

In the book “Angry white men” Michel Kimmel analyses how the changes in the society are influencing men’s behaviour, leading them to take actions, such, as conservative political organizations, domestic violence and in extreme cases - mass shootings. Using The Office analogy: Gareth Kennan and Lee do not want to be a joke anymore; their male pride came to life to be rewarded. We underestimated the number of Gareth Kennan’s and Lee’s in the streets, in the army, in the offices, in the factories. They became politicians, writers, activists. They hate modern art, history, geography, human rights and everything that humiliated them in the last decades and show’s a changing world. They hate the women who don’t value their ‘strong male characteristics’, the women who do not accept to play a role in a male model of family as Dawn did. They can’t understand fine humour; they feel that the media left them to the wolves, alone in an increasingly complex society.

Twenty years ago, and The Office had already understood these changes. There is a lot of series, movies and books that analyse the past very well and it is amazing. But just a few can ‘draw’ a changing society while it is happening. The English sitcom paved the way for a new type of humour that can be seen in different languages and different countries. In Brazil, the group ‘Porta dos Fundos’ is making a stunning success with its clever society critics. Another good example - from the United States - is Bojack Horseman, a ‘real’ adult cartoon. The challenge is trying to make all the Gareth Kennan’s we have in the UK – or Brazil- to share this humour that makes fun of ourselves, humour that shows us our flaws, what we need to change – nothing better than to beat hate, rage, frustration by laughs and thoughts.