10 Hilarious TV Running Gags That Lasted An Insanely Long Time
9. Michael Hates Toby - The Office
A lot of sitcoms have the punching bag character, that person who everyone else gangs up on and who becomes the butt of every joke. The Office did that with Toby, but what made it even funnier is that only Michael hates him, and it's not even clear why.
The first instance of Toby hate goes back to Season 1, when Michael is extremely offended by Toby making an innocent joke. The writers immediately found it hilarious for Michael to absolutely despise Toby for seemingly no reason, and so that became a running gag for the rest of the series. Never is his visceral reaction to Toby really explained, although it's probably just because he works for human resources, a department Michael sees as getting in the way of his fun.
The joke works best when Toby doesn't have it coming at all; he's just an average, boring office worker going about his job, and then he gets relentlessly beaten down by Michael out of nowhere. It can be pretty freaking brutal, like with the "I hate so much about the things you choose to be" rant. Unfortunately, this got a bit less funny later on as the show made Toby into more of a pathetic guy rather than just an average dude, and so this usually effective running gag was yet another casualty of The Office's decline in quality.