The Office Writer Criticizes SNL’s Japanese Office Parody Featuring White Actors
Before Mike Schur helped create beloved comedy series like “The Good Place,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and “Parks and Recreation,” he won Emmys as a writer for “Saturday Night Live” and “The Office.” The two series collided in May 2008 when “The Office” star Steve Carell hosted “SNL” and took part in a viral digital short film titled “The Japanese Office,” which has since racked up 17 million views on YouTube . However, Schur recently said further “The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast” (via Entertainment weekly) that the parody left him “a little irritated.”
“I didn’t feel like reflecting [‘The Office’] in the way I hoped the show would somehow express itself,” Schur said. “I worked at ‘SNL,’ but you still feel like ‘SNL’ is on some level an arbiter of what’s important in the culture. And when [Carell] did ‘The Japanese Office’, I remember being a little annoyed.
The digital short film ‘The Japanese Office’ is introduced by Ricky Gervais, who says the Japanese version of ‘The Office’ inspired his British sitcom which inspired the Carell-winning US version of ‘The Office’. The short film features scenes from the show featuring ‘Japanese’ versions of Michael (Carell), Dwight (Bill Hader), Jim (Jason Sudeikis) and Pam (Kristen Wiig). The characters speak Japanese, eat ramen noodles and more. Gervais ends the short film with the punchline: “It’s funny because it’s racist.”
“It didn’t feel right to me somehow,” Schur said of the sketch now, adding that he still doesn’t fully understand “the premise” of the parody. “It’s like, ‘They stole the show from me, but I stole it from the Japanese version,’ but all the actors in the Japanese version are white people. Somehow it didn’t get through to me.”
Loney Island member Akiva Schaffer directed “The Japanese Office” and explained a previous podcast episode of “The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast” that he was “concerned at the time” about making the sketch since the “SNL” cast was full of white actors. According to Shaffer, it was “SNL” writer Marika Sawyer who had the vision for the sketch and he followed her lead. Sawyer is Japanese-American.
“I would just keep looking at her and say, ‘Okay, I’m here to make your dreams come to life,’” Schaffer said. “I think everyone looked at Marika and said, ‘This is your baby.’ Let’s go. We’re going to support it.’ But it was her thing.”
Schur said that “SNL” was much more successful at parodying “The Office” back then. Rainn Wilson hostedwhile his monologue humorously talked about the differences between the two comedy series.
