Didn’t Like ‘SNL’s’ Japanese ‘Office’ Sketch? Neither Did Michael Schur

Nothing ages worse than comedy! CGI can seem cutting-edge upon release and look downright silly within a few months. A pair of sweet, stylish JNCO jeans could have gotten you praise in 2002 and mocked in 2003 (though I see they’re back now??). Hell, even culturally anointed “Summer Songs” hardly make it the duration of the season without protest. Still, comedy can age so quickly that a joke or sketch can be dead on arrival. It doesn’t help that people in comedy like to do things they deem “risky.”

Pushing buttons is a big part of comedy. It works sometimes. Crafting material close to the edge can force people to look at things differently. Andy Warhol once said, “Art is anything you can get away with.” The snag, as Anthony Jeselnik astutely explained, is that too many “comedians” don’t care if they get away with it. They just want to push buttons. So, they will do things that are “shocking” but not funny. That happens a lot, even on the grandest of stages like Saturday Night: Live.

The 2000s are filled with plenty of comedy moments that scream, “We were still doing that?” A lot of those moments include blackface; several others include Ricky Gervais. Here, we have a combination of racial insensitivity and Ricky Gervais; A real twofer! Steve Carell was hosting an episode of the show but Gervais made a cameo introducing a Japanese version of The Office. What followed was a sketch done in Japanese with no subtitles, stereotypes, and white people playing Japanese characters. Michael Schur, a writer for the American Office and SNL, did not care for it.

The creator recently sat down with The Lonely Island And Seth Meyers Podcast and revealed how little he cared for the insensitive sketch and why SNL doing it mattered. “I worked at SNL, but you still feel like SNL at some point, at some level, is an arbiter of what matters in the culture,” Schur explained. “And when [Carell] did ‘The Japanese Office,’ I remember being a little bit rankled.” It wasn’t just that the sketch was insensitive; it felt disrespectful, as he explained to the gentlemen who wrote for the show at the time.

“It’s like, ‘They stole the show from me, but I stole it from the Japanese version,’ but then all the actors in the Japanese version are white people,” noted Schur. “It sort of didn’t track to me somehow.” He went on to explain that SNL parodying the show a year prior worked great (and gave us our first taste of Jason Sudeikis as Jim). It was an ill-advised idea for SNL. Schur’s personal feelings aside, this sketch grew from an offensive place and only gets worse the more you look at it.