The Fall of Roy

 Sometime in 2005 or thereabouts, when I was 15, my sister told me I should watch a new comedy on TV that had recently come out. I was instantly resistant. "Whatever it is," I thought, "it must be terrible." 

To understand my distrust, you have to realize what sort of fare we were used to on TV in those days. On most TV comedies geared toward a younger audience up to that point, the prevailing male archetype was what Douglas Rushkoff—in a 2001 documentary called The Merchants of Cool—dubbed in entertainment-industry jargon "the Mook." This was typically a loud, brash, sexist male buffoon whose primary goals in life were drinking and getting laid. 

Amazingly, from a contemporary perspective, the Mook was not the villain of these shows. Instead of hating and fearing this character, as the embodiment of all the forces of barely-restrained violence and menace we confronted daily in high school, we were actually supposed to like and admire him—at least if we were teenage boys ourselves. The Mook was the masculine ideal of the MTV generation. 

I assumed that any new comedy on TV would serve a re-heated helping of the same. My sister, though, swore that this comedy was different. And as she usually is able to do, she eventually wore down my opposition. We popped in the DVD (that's how it worked in those days—you had to obtain boxed-sets of the shows you wanted to binge) and turned it on. 

Sure enough, to my dismay, the "Mook" soon appeared, within a few episodes. He was loud, braying, odious, horrible. His name was Todd Packer. But then I noticed, to my astonishment, our hero was not a Mook-sympathizer. Instead, he was often in the corner, while this character was bellowing, making dismayed faces and shaking his head. He too, then, was disgusted by the Mook's vulgarity, bullying, sexism, and moral stupidity. What was this? I thought. I'd never seen anything like it. 

The show, of course, was the US version of The Office, and the anti-Mook hero I admired was Jim Halpert. It will be hard for people today to recover a sense of just how groundbreaking it seemed to have someone like Jim as the male protagonist of a comedy series at the time, but I tell you it made a difference for me. It was the first time I had seen someone I could admire and relate to held up in a TV comedy as an aspirational male figure. 

What seemed to me at the time a profound innovation in comedy, of course, was really just a recovery of an ancient norm. I have learned from reading Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism that Jim was not so much a new figure in literature, as a summoning of one of its oldest archetypes. Many comedies, ancient and modern, Frye tells us, have revolved around the confrontation between the alazon (the boaster) and the eiron (the self-deprecator). 

This describes well the richest veins of comedic potential that The Office was able to mine. The funniest characters in the series are the alazons—particularly Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute—i.e., the imposters who are forever pretending to be something they are not. Michael wants to emulate the Mooks of the world—the Todd Packers—but he cannot hide his vulnerability and need to be liked. 

Dwight, meanwhile, is an updated version of the Roman miles gloriosus, the military braggart (something like Walter in The Big Lebowski). He sees himself as a physically-dominant alpha male, capable of crushing his foes and environment into submission—yet his means of expressing and pursuing this self-image—such as attending karate lessons for children and obsessing over the risk of potential bear attacks—only serve to underline his essential dweebishness. 

Amidst these strutting fakes, with their complete lack of self-awareness, sits the all-too-self-conscious Jim, shaking his head and raising his eyebrows at the camera. Jim is not a braggart of any kind. To the contrary, he talks himself down. To be sure, he deflates the pretensions of others as well, but many of his jokes are at his own expense. In all of these regards, he plays the role of eiron down to the letter: the self-deprecating figure who is ultimately shown to be of greater intrinsic worth than the boasters. 

The Office, then, was no fundamental innovation: it was more like a work of retrieval of archeological comedic forms that had been obscured under the dust and detritus of Jackass. I had fallen victim to literary art's ability to continuously resurrect old forms and yet make them seem new again. Frye predicted as much: "the audiences of vaudeville, comic strips, and television programs," he notes, "still laugh at the jokes that were declared to be outworn at the opening of The Frogs."

If The Office is fundamentally a comedy of the old-fashioned eiron-confronts-alazon type, though, this also perhaps explains the show's ultimate downfall. According to Frye, the basic formula for a comedy in this vein can accommodate the hero-as-eiron (though the eiron can also be a helpful observer or sidekick who assists the hero's prospects with the heroine), but from that point on the series wanders from the fundamental structure of comedy. 

Typically, in comedy, says Frye, the basic conflict revolves around the hero's attempts to wed the heroine. In order for a plot to unfold, though, something must be preventing them from being together from the start. Usually, this is the alazon himself—either an overbearing boastful rival who is ultimately shown up for the charlatan and faker he is, or an equally self-deluded parental figure who is governed by a "ruling passion" or obsession that blocks the male and female leads from finding one another. 

In The Office, however, Dwight the miles gloriosus is no rival for Pam's affection. Michael Scott, the parental figure, may certainly be governed by comedic "ruling passions," but he does not pose any significant obstacle to Jim's relationship with Pam. The only barrier to their inevitable romance, to the contrary, is a relatively blank figure named Roy—Pam's blue collar high school flame who works in the warehouse.

Roy is ultimately thrown over for the more interesting and endearing Jim, but not because he is unmasked as an imposter or braggart, or because he displays any other glaring flaw. He is never portrayed as a comic character or alazon of any description, and his chief failing as a boyfriend seems to be a general dull-wittedness and mild insensitivity. 

Now, comedy, in Frye's telling, demands a sacrifice as surely as does any ritual activity. The victim—the pharmakos or scapegoat—of this sacrifice is usually the defeated rival, who is unmasked as a villain and empty boaster in the comedy's final act and banished from the stage. At the same time, however, the fundamental impulse in comedy is toward inclusion. Thus, if the focus is diverted from the hero and heroine's eventual inclusion in a wedding or feast, and shifts instead to the banishment and isolation of the rival, the play risks failing as a comedy and becoming a tragedy instead. 

Thus, writes Frye, the unmasking and defeat of the rival must be handled "very lightly" in order to remain convincing. The pharmakos in a comedy must be portrayed as so unrelentingly evil that they merit not an iota of sympathy, and their exile or defeat must be passed over so quickly that one has no time to sympathize with them. The ideal-type would be the Disney villain who dangles from a precipice in the film's final act, and whom the hero tries to save, but who dooms himself regardless somehow through his own greed or brutality. ("Give me your hand!" "No, I must reach for the treasure!")

The problem with Roy is that he is never portrayed as sufficiently evil or as a big enough imposter to justify his banishment. Yet we know he must be exiled in the end nonetheless. 

The show eventually tries to railroad through a moral justification for Roy's dismissal by by having him show up at work and try to physically assault Jim. This feeble attempt at revenge is so quickly defeated, however—and is so much more likely to end up ruining Roy's life than it is to affect Jim's—that it seems more pathetic than frightening, and Roy's subsequent exile seems more mean-spirited than deserved. Our pities have shifted to the pharmakos. 

With the Tragedy of Roy complete, there is no barrier left to Jim and Pam's affections for one another. Michael and Dwight continue to be irritants to them both, but neither has the power to interfere in their relationship. The show therefore spins its wheels for a time: the primary barrier to Jim and Pam's reconciliation now becomes Jim's strange sense of wounded pride and resentment—unappealing traits in an eiron, who is supposed to be disinterested and possessed of a rock of inner confidence that is so secure it requires no boasting. 

Eventually, the show bows to the inevitable, and Jim and Pam get together. This, as everyone watching at home knew, is the end of the comedy. The curtain should descend once the heroine and hero are wed, otherwise we will soon get bored. 

But instead, the network kept milking the premise for ratings, and thus the show runners were forced to come up with some other way to prolong the action. Of necessity, the focus shifted to Michael Scott, and once it did so, the alazon stopped being funny and became kind of sad. The Office turned into the Tragedy of Michael Scott, now, the next pharmakos. 

It is thus generally conceded that The Office ran out of steam after about the third season or so (as most shows do, in fairness). But its gift to TV comedy is that it returned the eiron to his rightful place at the center of the audience's attention. Prior comedies had gotten it totally wrong: they realized that the clown and buffoon are funny, and thereby assumed such figures should be the central ones in a comedy; they neglected the fact that a series also needs someone recognizably human at the focal-point of its action, who observes and comments bemusedly, and in whom the audience can detect real merit, obscured behind an armor of modesty. This was The Office's great realization and the secret of its triumph. 

The device was so successful for the first few seasons of the show's run, in fact, that it soon became the formula for most TV comedies over the next decade. The 2009 series, Party Down—recently revived—works on a similar comedic premise. The central male character, played by Adam Scott, is relentlessly self-effacing, mocking his own professional failure as an actor and the directionless quality of his life. Yet, the audience can plainly see (and we applaud ourselves for recognizing it beneath the facade) that he is the one in the group of real and lasting worth, unlike the outsized alazons that surround him. 

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is an interesting variation on the formula. It is an experiment—and this is perhaps the source of its genius—in having a central cast made up entirely of alazons. Every one of its central "gang" is profoundly self-deluded about their own character and potential, with hilarious results.  Yet, what saves this from becoming a show about Mooks and clowns—a Jackass redivivus—is that the audience is cast in the role of the eiron that sees the hollowness of their boasting. 

Moreover, each character operates as an eiron toward all the others, sarcastically commenting on their delusions, while at the same time being utterly oblivious of their own. The idea that every character is both alazon and eiron may perhaps be a genuinely original method of recombining the ancient elements, and this perhaps accounts for why It's Always Sunny still feels original and sui generis, even after the formulae of The Office have now become stale through reuse in countless similar shows. 

Frye's point, in Anatomy of Criticism, is that being able to recognize these sorts of elements and their use in various contexts implies no value judgment on the works themselves. Deploying these elements does not indicate a lack of "originality," because the re-arrangement of fundamental literary elements is all any work actually is. We should not deplore a screenwriter for using the ancient tropes of comedy, that is to say, any more than we would a musician for using an eight-note scale. 

Frye's goal, then, was to create a form of literary criticism that focused on something other than value-judgments, and while I was skeptical of the possibility of such an outcome at the start of the book (what else is criticism, I thought, than a method of deciding which books are good and which ones are bad?), I came away somewhat more persuaded. A treatise on musical theory, Frye argues, would not devote any pages to ranking the best symphonies. Instead, it would describe the elements out of which all music is made, whether bad or good. Why should a work of literary theory or literary criticism not do the same? 

Yet, as the examples above show, it is hard to avoid making value-judgments, once we go searching for Frye's elements in the works at hand. We see how The Office has the beginnings of an ancient comedy, but then we notice as well how it fails to deliver its payoff. Where is the comic "discovery"? The show has alazons aplenty, but where is the alazon who is also a rival or a parental "blocking figure"? 

This does not mean we should apply Frye's categories legislatively. We should not say: The Office departs from the format, therefore it fails! But if we notice that it ultimately failed, on an emotional level (as anyone who hung on after Season Three of The Office would be forced to concede), then Frye's schema can provide some insight into why it failed. 

Nor should we conclude from all this that the ancient unvarying formulae are the only way to succeed. As we saw, It's Always Sunny has managed to break with the classic format and nonetheless triumph. But the way it has done so is largely through recombining the ancient elements, rather than discarding them. And the way The Office failed, meanwhile, was not through an attempted originality that failed, but through a pitfall of one of the ancient elements—the pharmakos—that is as old as the element itself. 

We are meant to feel "relief," Frye writes, when the pharmakos is led off at the end of a comedy, and the heroine and hero are left free to marry in peace. But to do so, as we have seen, the pharmakos needs to both eminently deserve their fate, and the fate itself needs to be a fairly mild one (or at least passed over quickly), if we are to remain within the emotional universe of comedy. 

This is why the device works so well when the pharmakos is a comic alazon boaster. Usually, after all, their fate at the end of the play is no worse than an unmasking and a dismissal. Plus, precisely because it is their lack of self-awareness that has made them what they are, one fundamentally feels that they will suffer nothing from the ordeal, because their delusions are impregnable (this is what makes the various mishaps that befall the central characters of It's Always Sunny delightful rather than depressing—one knows they will instantly bounce back). 

But Roy is not the voluble boaster of ancient comedy whom we long to see shown up, and whom we trust will nevertheless land on his feet anyways. He is not the over-eager people-pleaser Michael Scott, or the geeky quasi-fascist miles gloriosus Dwight Schrute. To the contrary, he has one of the traits that Frye identifies most strongly with pathos: namely, the fact of being inarticulate. It is his very ineptitude with words that ultimately leads him to use a fist; thus, his final act of villainy, far from cementing the audience's desire to see him punished and exiled, just makes him seem more pathetic. 

Thus, he suffers and departs in silent anguish. The mob closes ranks against him, and waits for the wedding feast of Jim and Pam. But Jim—who extends no hand of reconciliation to Roy—sneers at Pam for having ever dated such an oaf, and wanders off to a different branch of the company—thereby prolonging the plot for another season but dampening our sympathies for him.

Frye writes: "Insisting on the theme of social revenge on an individual, however great a rascal he may be, tends to make him look less involved in guilt and the society more so." So it is with The Office. The banishment of Roy makes those who remain for the Feast of Jim and Pam seem like a closed society that has barred its doors to us as well, rather than an open one that ultimately invites us onto the stage. Our sympathies will therefore remain with the pharmakos, the Roy, even if he never be heard from again.