The Parks and Rec Campaign

From Bill Lumbergh to Kamala Harris

I’m reminded of an observation of Menaquinone, that The Office (US) has done more to pervert the psyches of his generation than any other media. If you disagree with the point, the Kamala Harris Campaign should make you think otherwise. All the drunken (or high? or stupid?) pressers, the gab about the swinish Walz not knowing what pepper and nutmeg are, the attempts to declare her campaign triumphant in the metric of “joy”—these are all bad jokes taken kind of seriously precisely because we’ve been programmed to laugh with people we should be laughing at. And we got to this place in large part because of the media environment men like producers Greg Daniels and Michael Schur helped bring about. If you can grok how a bitter satire of office life became a breathless encomium to girl-bossing, then you might have a chance at understanding the goonshow campaign.

But the first topic is office comedy. Given its ubiquity today, it’s funny to note how rare fiction about office environments has been until the last forty years. Sitcoms back in the day focused on more interesting jobs, and even the ruminations of the existentialists in the early 20^th Century generally left office contretemps as a side issue, even as a kind of reprieve from an otherwise useless life. Charles Lamb is probably the most famous desk worker in English letters, yet he rarely lingered on it, and never let any dreariness he experienced during his days dull the basic ebullience of his extracurricular work. Those who are most prone to lives of quiet desperation have failed to notice it.

The reason for this is that men can perform pretty monotonous tasks for pretty long periods of time so long as they know they’re contributing to something necessary and worthwhile. Men will withstand slavery in order to build great monuments or invade enemy lands. The plight of cubicle work is a pretty easy servitude, so long as the end is right.

The popular obsession with the workplace did not begin until the later 20th Century. Dilbert, Office Space, and the original Office all painted bleak pictures of workaday life. Work is not only tainted by bureaucratic absurdity, but life itself is rendered meaningless against the inanity of the corporate environment. What exactly changed in the 80s and 90s? The full setting in of Civil Rights bureaucracy. Large masses of women and minorities now occupied the workplace, enough to change the tone of any office from one in which everyone is there to achieve some end to one where the office exists for women and minorities to prove they have the ability to get themselves jobs in an office.

This is the primary effect of the Civil Rights Act, to ensure that private businesses exist in order to promote equality between the unequal, all while the formal reasons for existence melt into air. The corporation was founded in order to achieve particular ends. But to the diversity commissar, the formal ends of the corporation are to find homes for a cacophony of women and minorities. The formal end of the corporation is to find places for protected groups within it; the actual success of the corporation is incidental to this primary goal. All private organizations now existed in the good graces of the administrative state, and the corporate world becomes just an extension of the Civil Rights regime. Incompetent managers become not a funny peculiarity, but an intrinsic component of the system—in fact, they’re a sign that the system works.

There was always something serious in those critiques of office life. The irony of Mike Judge was that of the existentialists—the initial observation that man had worth, a worth his bleak and inane surroundings did not adequately acknowledge. And this was the attitude of the original British Office, which was a great show, truly one of the last great pieces of art to come out of England. It worked primarily because David Brent, the boss, really was a vile, evil little man and his workers genuinely hated being near him. He referred to his employees as "family," and we laugh because we see how demeaning it is. The show was filmed in a documentary format—its most notable feature—which was meant to bring out the self-obsession of Brent and to add a little extra jibe at the characters, who not only have to endure Hell but know they’re being watched going through it.

The English Office lasted roughly the run of one season of an American sitcom. When money dictated it should be tried in America, it soon became clear that the hellish setting could not last for 200 episodes. The American boss, Michael Scott, starts out as nasty as Brent in the original, but was cajoled by low ratings into a lovable oaf. We learn as the series progresses that for whatever ostensible incompetency (exemplified at least once every two minutes) Michael is, in fact, inexplicably great at his job. The hellish concept of the “work family” becomes sincere by the end of the show, with almost every major character pairing off with an office mate. It’s as if the American producers looked at the original show and asked, But what if Hell….was good?

The central premise of the show is the same, an office followed around by a documentary film crew. But in the American version, cameras appear whenever it is convenient, sometimes end up in bedrooms, and regularly capturing moments that would never occur if people knew they were being watched (and for nine years!?). It’s worth asking the question why was the central conceit of the show so easy to accept. Then you realize: The cameras are a stand-in for the social media of the time. The Office was never really popular like Seinfeld or Friends, but it took on an outsized cultural cache because it reflected a rising class of social media users. This was a time when Facebook was still mostly limited to college students and professionals, Twitter was still an open CIA front, and only the relatively affluent possessed smartphones they could pour their thoughts into throughout the day (the vulgar masses were still left with MySpace and whatever CBS swill was on at the time). The Office’s weak documentary style was in fact social media come to life, with the cuts to camera serving as a posting board for everyone making clever comments about their lives. Eventually the titular office becomes a warmer and nicer place than anyone’s actual home, everyone learns to love one another, and so forth.

Parks and Recreation was the reductio ad absurdum of this. It was basically a remake of The Office, with all lingering elements of the British original's bite excised, and in its place a saccharine defense of bureaucratic incompetence and the inanity of Obama era optimism.  Leslie Knope begins, a la Michael Scott, unlikeable and incompetent middle manager, but is transformed into an incompetent-yet-somehow-really-competent Hilary Clinton clone. She, with her ragtag band of bureaucrats, proves to a bigoted small town that when people adhere to proper procedural rules and strive to be DECENT, things work out. 

Unlike the Office shows, it’s never clear if Parks and Rec is an actual documentary. Apparently they are being filmed, because there are still the breakaway interviews and shots of characters gawking to the camera, but it’s also possible that the characters are just insanely taking asides and making glib comments to no one. From the very first show the camera crews are apparently entrenched in the characters’ houses. No one thinks it’s odd. Though it is still nominally a workplace comedy, the cameras intrude everywhere, and there is no real difference between work and home, except that the people are work are amusing enough to gawk at “cameras” when they remember they’re there.

Parks and Rec was social media after the plebs were allowed on Facebook, when not only professional life but the entire course of one’s personal life became filtered through the sieve of algorithms. Just as importantly, it was social media in the days before Trump, when explicit censorship was not necessary, and the benevolent hand of bureaucrats shifted conversation where it should be: about banal and nonoffensive beer summits and the heckling of libertarians, always veering down the dual asymptotes of lofty Obama platitudes and the barely-literate heckling of the Tea Party types.

Throughout the show’s run, Leslie Knope never grows as a character in any discernible way, but the world around comes to acknowledge her decency, and elect her to city council on her way to Washington. But that’s just feminism. Maybe the most bizarre effect of the show had to do with Joe Biden. Knope has an all-consuming crush on Joe Biden. In theory, there’s pretty sound comedic basis for this affection, because Joe Biden has always been known as an unlovable, unlikeable, unrespectable piece of garbage, even when his brain somewhat functioned and he could get it up for his granddaughters in the shower. But as the series progressed, the Biden crush became more and more sincere, finally culminating in the old codger making a guest spot on the show. The joke was no longer the absurd juxtaposition, it was—what was the joke? If I remember the cameo correctly, he didn’t even sniff her hair. Where’s the comedy? “Leslie has a crush on Joe Biden?” Well, that’s a funny premise. Wait, she’s serious? And this is endearing? It’s as if Ralph Kramden had actually paid NASA to send his wife to the moon.

Even cheesiest and most mawkish family sitcoms still had jokes. Parks and Rec is exceptional for how often the producers nearly set up amusing punchlines, then backed away from them in order to make a character feel good, or to have one pause to reassure another. The humor of these shows is all feminine, notwithstanding the fact that women can’t really be funny. The laughter that comes out of it is what you expect of a gaggle of women laughing at one another, a long chorus of "mm-hmms." It ended up being a kind of ASMR program masquerading as a comedy. Here is a quote from a NYT writer about the special that aired during the lockdowns in 2020: '“Parks” didn’t return for half an hour to tell us what to think; it helped us feel what we feel.' Isn’t that kind of weird statement? Do we really need comedy shows to make us feel? Shouldn’t a comedy show make you laugh?

What you end up finding perfected in the US Office and Parks and Rec is the attribute that characterizes “Millennial humor.” Comedy of all types is always based on exposing some absurdity, but the modern strain of comedy relies not on observing some outward absurdity, but ends up shifting it inward and chalking it up to quirkiness. Sarcasm has been replaced by haplessness as the fallback attitude of comedy. Both are ironical, but sarcasm presumes a sense of being superior to the situation—the sarcastic prick is at home with himself, but he has an ironic detachment from his idiotic environs (this is the attitude of any satire, and the attitude of the original Office). But in the new strain, it is no longer the outward situation that is absurd, but somehow the person observing it. For modern people, it is they themselves who are the absurd things, and the outward world something they must conform to. You see this all the time on Parks and Rec: A solid setup (like a loveable Joe Biden) for a punchline you aren’t allowed to deliver. The same goes for the average responses to “diversity training” and sexual mores in the modern mode: It is not the outward absurdities that are unnaturally grotesque, but our inability to live up to them.

Evelyn Waugh used to protest that, pace the critics, what he wrote was not satire, and that real satire was impossible in the 20^th Century. "Satire flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogeneous standards ... It is aimed at inconsistency and hypocrisy. It exposes polite cruelty and folly by exaggerating them. It seeks to produce shame. All this has no place in the Century of the Common Man where vice no longer pays lip service to virtue." No one could satirize the past four years of the Biden-Harris administration, because it’s literally impossible. It isn’t something serious, it’s barely a thing. Against any standard of legitimacy, the outward show of the administration is illegitimate. But there are no standards, and so there can’t really be any comedy.

Now we have Joe Biden’s own chosen Knope, Karmala Harris, who is very funny in a dissociative kind of way. She’s a literal prostitute, an affirmative action beneficiary, a boiling pot of weak genetic material and all the pharmacological innovations that keep her cackling from stop to stop running an opposition campaign against her own administration. In any other age she would be the source of Swiftian satire, a firm proof that the human race has failed in allowing this creature to rise to prominence, but there can be no satire where there is no standard.

People still know there is something wrong with the whole thing, reflected in the absolute lack of enthusiasm for the thing from anyone not full of drugs and propaganda that keep her moving forward. None of this is any impediment to her getting “elected” after all. If it all seems to surreal to you, if it strikes you somewhere as being below the standards of even the most democratic of government, don’t worry about it—just smirk at the camera, Jim. In a world without standards, all that’s left is to gawk at the camera—breaking the fourth wall into some kind of aeviternity that you sense must exist, but which has no effect on the world around you.

And all politics aside, this has been the real dividing line between Trump and anti-Trump that has characterized the past ten years. Trump is the last great comedian in American politics, a crude Bortsch Belt comic mocking a system far cruder and more vulgar than he. Trump is actually funny because he plays to universal truths (Kamala is stupid, Biden is senile, Hillary is corrupt); he is playing the part of the traditional clown. He can do it because he holds a common conception of America apart from the scumbags who rule over us. His role as the last American satirist is also why Trump, one way or the other, will be the last American president. A system that has no standards for legitimacy cannot be exposed as absurd.