10 Reasons Why The Office Is The Greatest Sitcom Ever

4. It's The King Of Cringe Comedy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6Eaz-1_3iA Part of the perverse pleasure that comes from watching The Office is knowing that you should really look away and yet you can't bring yourself to tear your eyes from the screen. You can see pitfalls suddenly opening up in otherwise prosaic conversations and yet you still wince when someone falls down. David Brent is usually that someone. He's an embarrassment, a one-man comedy of errors. Each episode sees him play victim to his own satisfaction, his sheer tactlessness and hopelessness propelling him from one faux-pas to the next. Whether it's squirming out of a prank that has clearly backfired or accidentally kicking a football into an interviewee's face, there's always something that makes you wish you hadn't just heard/seen that. It's those innocent looks to camera that really make us cringe, as though he's completely oblivious as to what has just happened. And nowhere is this used to more devastating effect than the scene in which he jovially tells an approaching woman that ''I was expecting a blind date and I was worried you were it''. Immediately he realises what he has just said. He tries to correct himself but the woman walks straight past him. Brent simply looks at us, his eyes widening in fear. Larry David may have the courage to say what we're all thinking in Curb Your Enthusiasm. Steve Coogan may put both feet in his mouth in I'm Alan Partridge. But no one can quite make us feel so uncomfortably complicit in his crimes as Ricky Gervais in The Office.