The Office (US) is the most streamed show in the world. Now on Peacock, the show remains available for streamers to play on repeat. Watch it enough, though, and you start to notice things.  Even a show this good tends to run out of ideas once in a while, and sometimes creativity repeats itself. We’re not talking about recurring jokes like “That’s What She Said,” or “Assistant to the Regional Manager,” but rather jokes that appeared original seasons later, but were actually recycled bits from earlier seasons.

Characters Aping Each Other:

In Product Recall (Season 3, Episode 21), the episode starts with Jim imitating Dwight.

Then, at the end of the episode, Dwight gets his revenge:

This is a hilarious exchange, and a concept well-executed. The concept, however is repeated two seasons later in Employee Transfer (Season 5, Episode 5).

In this episode, beet farmer Dwight, a sexual competitor to Andy Bernard, dresses in a Cornell University sweatshirt to make fun of Andy, who boasts too much about attending the Ivy League School. This culminates in a makeshift Cornell admissions interview. Watch this scene at the 7:07 mark int his video:

Then, at the end of the episode, Andy dresses up as a beet farmer, likely to get back at Dwight for aping his Cornell Pride. A brief clip from that exchange is below.

 

Older Men in The Office Don’t Notice Obvious Things

The first instance of this joke form appeared in Safety Training (Season 3, Episode 20). The Dunder Mifflin team is bored, and have started making prop bets around the office. One bet is whether the elderly Creed Bratton will notice if someone swaps his apple for a potato.

Then, in Costume Contest (Season 7, Episode 6) this joke form is revisited at a much larger scale when the workers notice that old grump Stanley Hudson pretty much notices nothing.

 

So, is it wrong for the writers to repeat these joke forms? Nope. It certainly didn’t stop them from keeping the show successful. We can only wonder if they did it on accident, or if these were late-series callbacks to the originals.  Did you notice any other repeating themes on the Office?