There were so many bloopers and gags produced in The Office that they could almost make up
their own show. Some of those cut gags were even funnier than the final version
of the scene. Here is the best of those character-breaking, line-fumbling moments.
Now that he's broken up with Jan, Michael is pitifully lonely and desperate enough to
become borderline obsessed with the model in an office supply catalog.
Desperate for companionship before he gets too old and can't have kids,
Michael demands his subordinates each write down the name of a single woman they know that he could
go on a date with. In the original scene, after a whole afternoon of Michael's self-pitying antics,
Pam relents and says she has someone for him: her poor, unsuspecting landlady.
"Michael?"
"Uh."
"Are you Michael Scott?"
The blooper during this scene came in the form of a poorly delivered line.
"Is — Is she hot? That was such a bad take!"
Ryan Howard, introduced to us in the pilot episode as a mild-mannered temp,
has risen to the rank of corporate VP by the beginning of season four. When he
reintroduces himself to "his favorite branch" in Scranton, neither his five o'clock shadow nor his
Bluetooth nor his new, expensive suit succeed in getting anyone to respect him the way he wants.
The people who don't like him continue not liking him, and the people who do won't stop
treating him like he's still the adorable little office temp that everyone likes to pick on.
In the original scene, Ryan snaps and admonishes Michael in front of the office.
"I am your boss now. You're gonna have to treat me the same way you treated Jan."
In the blooper, Steve Carrell and Brian Baumgartner imitated him, and he began laughing.
"But you--"
After he finished laughing, BJ apologized.
"I'm really sorry I broke, that was too good."
This episode begins with a despondent Phyllis telling her coworkers that she was flashed by
a man in a trench coat after she stopped to help him with directions in the parking lot.
Michael goes back and forth between making crass,
inappropriate jokes and trying to host a series of women's appreciation seminars
and events for which, as Jim points out, he is completely unqualified to manage.
"I'd like to apologise for all of the men who thought this was a laughing matter."
Meanwhile, Dwight announces the creation of a very serious indeed anti-flashing
task force that will be run entirely by him, even though he has no clue how to
investigate a crime and local police are already on the job. While explaining the
task force to his coworkers, he refers to Phyllis as "phallus" before apologizing.
"Phyllis, sorry. I've got penises on the brain."
"Back to work everybody."
Naturally, a scene like this would be hard to get through with a straight face.
The cast tried it multiple times, breaking constantly. At one point,
Rainn Wilson, who played Dwight, tried to muscle through and complete the scene.
"That is a risk that we have to— No, no, no, I know what you're saying."
"Why do you— Why do you keep going?"
With Michael and Pam out giving sales training presentations to the other regional branches,
Jim and Dwight are in charge of the office.
Things immediately take a turn for the worse when they realize they've forgotten Kelly's birthday.
Kelly is angry, and when Dwight stands up for Jim, she grows even angrier.
"Yeah, screw you, beet farmer! I don't forget your birthday. I would never do that."
"Guys, Guys, Guys."
Jim tries to salvage the situation before Dwight yells back and makes it
worse by promising her a cake and a party that afternoon.
It's probably not that surprising that a scene like this might've been a little too much fun
to shoot. In other takes, every time John Krasinski steps in to lower the temperature,
Rainn Wilson shoots him a shocked, wide-eyed look.
"Hey! Guys. C—"
"Stop doing that. It makes no sense."
By the third failure, they're all a little bit frustrated, but still having plenty of fun.
At the beginning of the fifth season, the Scranton
branch participates in a company-wide weight loss competition. Naturally,
things go astray. Kelly starves herself and tries to buy a tapeworm from Creed. Dwight,
after insulting several of his coworkers for their weight, tricks Phyllis into going on a
non-existent sales call, only to abandon her, forcing her to burn calories on her walk back.
"There was no client.
Dwight drove me to an abandoned warehouse five miles away and pushed me out of the car.”
Holly sets up an HR meeting to address the madness, but Michael ruins it by donning a
semi-deflated sumo suit and appearing in character as "Michael Klump,"
an insulting "celebration" of overweight people.
"This big, fat pig is beautiful."
The original scene is an Office classic, but the gag version is even better.
"Well, hello everybodyyyy."
Carrell had to try multiple takes before everyone was able to hold in their laughter.
An excited Andy and a not-so-excited Angela have decided, at her insistence,
to book Schrute Farms as their wedding venue, and are planning a lunch break trip to check it out.
Problem is, proprietor Dwight doesn't know how to give acceptable directions.
"Walk until you hear the beehive."
When Andy brings this up, Dwight insists the directions are perfectly normal.
"How could it be more clear?"
In the bloopers from this scene, nobody can keep a straight face as Ed Helms
tries out some bizarre, obviously ad-libbed lines.
"If you are attacked by territorial crows—"
It clearly took quite a few tries to get a usable take.
Pam is pregnant with her and Jim's first child, but she's resisting everyone's attempts to get
her to the hospital. If you ask her, she'd say she wants to wait until after midnight for insurance
purposes, but the reality is that she's scared of going into labor and wants to drag it out.
Jim is slowly losing it trying to get her to the hospital, and at one point relies
on Michael to tell him when her contractions start coming every five minutes. When he finds
out they're now coming every two minutes, he yells at Michael for not informing him earlier.
"We waited too long. Two minutes doesn't do us any good. Well, what happened to four
and three minutes?!"
In other takes, the actors struggled to make it through this scene without cracking.
"No, what—"
"You gotta hold it together, okay?"
The kickoff to season 4 is Meredith ending up hospitalized after Michael hits her with
his car in the parking lot. She has a minor pelvic fracture and gets a rabies shot after
the doctor finds out she might've been bitten by a bat when one was trapped in the office
during the previous season. This prompts a guilt-stricken Michael to launch a "Fun
Run" race for the rabies cure, despite the fact that Meredith likely doesn't have rabies — and,
as Jim pointed out, it's already been cured. While he's organizing all that,
Pam rallies the coworkers for a lunch break carpool to visit Meredith in the hospital.
In a scene that didn't make the final cut, Steve Carrell can't get his line right.
When Jenna Fischer tells everyone, quote, "Okay, we're leaving for the hospital at one," Carrell is
supposed to respond with, quote, "like a freedom tree?" Instead, he trips all over the line.
"Okay, so, we're all leaving for the hospital at 1 o'clock."
"Yes, so fab, fruh-freedom tree."
"I can take three—"
In season 7, Jim, Dwight, and even Michael, all seasoned and talented salesmen,
lose a major potential client to rival traveling rep Danny Cordray,
of Osprey Paper. Michael promptly calls the sales team to a brainstorming session
upon returning to the office, and asks everyone for ideas to outmaneuver Cordray.
"We sell better."
Michael mistakes Stanley's sarcasm for indifference, tells him to leave,
and suggests he has diabetes. Stanley insists he doesn't have diabetes and would like to stay,
for once, as Cordray affected his paycheck, but he eventually leaves.
"See? I could tell by the sound you made when you stood up that you have— Okay, yes Phillis?"
That scene took several tries to nail. Initially,
when Michael said his last line to Stanley, every cast member in the room lost it.
"See, just the noise you made when you stood up, I could—”
One of the major storylines of season three was the merging of the defunct Stamford,
Connecticut branch with the one in Scranton. Martin, one of the Stamford transplants,
is a former convict who'd been briefly imprisoned for insider trading, long before starting his
career with Dunder Mifflin. Once he finds out about this, Michael tries awkwardly defending
Martin, simply because he's Black and Michael is worried about stereotypes.
"But I just want to declare publicly that I trust him completely."
Then, when his subordinates start inquiring about prison and pretending to wish they were in it,
Michael sees Martin as a threat to office morale and his "fun
boss" shtick. In one scene, Michael barges into the break room,
where Martin is casually explaining his prison time to his new coworkers.
"Been a lot of fun talk about prison today, but I'm here to scare you straight."
In the bloopers, not knowing the camera was rolling, a crew member
audibly starts talking in the background, forcing everyone to reset for a new take.
"We're rolling, Alyssa." "Right, how are ya?"
"I thought somebody just said 'Mel.'"
In another take, Steve Carrell is delivering lines
in his iconic purple bandana when the group begins laughing.
"Where did you pinch him?"
Dunder Mifflin Infinity, Ryan Howard's new paper-buying online portal that he hopes will
modernize the ailing company, is going live. To celebrate, the office decides to order some
pizza for a branch party. Michael comes out of his office to announce that hot food is on the way.
"Good news."
"We get to go home?"
In a different take, Leslie David Baker doesn't just say that line — he shouts it,
joyously, wide-eyed, throwing his hands into the air and leaning back in his seat.
"I have some good news."
"We get to go home!"
This prompts Steve Carrell, followed quickly by the entire cast, to break into uncontrollable
laughter. Leslie himself is laughing harder than anyone. John Krasinski is howling so hard he holds
his hands over his face. If you don't at least crack up watching this, you may be dead inside.
If you're watching a video about The Office, you've almost certainly seen what's arguably
its greatest episode: Season 4's Dinner Party. Michael and his borderline psychotic girlfriend
and former boss, Jan, host an after-work get-together at their condo with Jim, Pam,
Andy, Angela, Dwight, and Dwight's former babysitter, who he brought as a date.
The episode, in which Michael and Jan's relationship unravels before the eyes of
their squirming guests over the course of an evening filled with awkward house tours,
failed business pitches, games that nobody likes, a screaming match about having kids,
passive-aggressive arguments between the hosts, a very late meal that both Pam and Michael think
Jan has poisoned, and much more, is a triumph of cringe comedy that's never been matched.
"Michael and Jan seem to be playing their own separate game,
and it's called, 'Let's see how uncomfortable we can make our guests.'"
The blooper reel is even more entertaining. The episode was famously hard to shoot because
everyone in it simply could not stop laughing long enough to get good takes.
In one take, Steve Carrell talks about Michael's tiny plasma screen TV before saying, quote,
"Right over here, Jim" to John Krasinski.
"I guess what surround sounds means is that— Right over here, Jim."
Co-writer Lee Eisenberg said,
"There's nothing more satisfying than having Steve Carell barely able to get through his lines."
"Oh, Jesus, this is terrible. We'll never finish this episode."
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