“The Office” Writer Michael Schur Explains Why “SNL”’s 2008 ‘Japanese Office’ Parody ‘Didn't Track to Me'

Saturday Night Live has always touched the zeitgeist — but did this parody of The Office miss the mark? One of the show’s writers, Michael Schur, thinks so.

On the Dec. 23 episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast, Schur, 49, and CNN anchor Jake Tapper talked to Seth Meyers about which SNL Digital Shorts they loved the most. They called their selections the Lonely Island’s “Criterion Collection,” cribbing the name of the popular film distributor that focuses on sharing and preserving “important classic and contemporary films.” Schur — who was a writer and producer of The Office and created series like Parks and Recreation, The Good Place and The Man Inside — also worked at SNL early in his career.

During the podcast, Meyers, 50, asked his guests if they thought the May 2008 digital short “The Japanese Office” should make the cut. Schur and Tapper both didn’t think so, and the former expanded on what he saw as the issues with the sketch.

"I worked at SNL, but you still feel like SNL at some point at some level is an arbiter of what matters in the culture,” he explained. “And when [Carell] did 'The Japanese Office,' I remember being a little bit rankled.”

In the sketch, Ricky Gervais — who starred in the original BBC The Office, which aired from 2001 to 2003 — claims that the British Office actually copied from the (fake) Japanese Office, which is now being seen for the first time. Then, Carell — who was hosting the episode — is joined by Bill Hader as Dwight, Jason Sudeikis as Jim and Kristen Wiig as Pam in a send-up of The Office that’s entirely in Japanese. They revisit many of the show’s most famous jokes, while also doing calisthenics and performing karaoke. To end the clip, Gervais declares, "It's funny 'cause it's racist."

Schur said he “doesn't quite understand the premise of the sketch.” He explained, "It's like, 'They stole the show from me, but I stole it from the Japanese version,' but then all the actors in the Japanese version are White people. It sort of didn't track to me somehow."

According to Entertainment Weekly, Lonely Island member Akiva Schaffer, who directed the short, spoke about the genesis of the sketch earlier this month, on the Dec. 16 episode of the podcast. Schaffer, 47, said that the sketch was co-written by Marika Sawyer, who is Japanese American and had the vision of the sketch using mostly White cast members.

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"I would just keep looking to her and go, okay, I'm here to bring your dreams to life ... I think everyone was looking to Marika being like, 'This is your baby. Let's go. We're gonna support it.' But it was her thing,” he said.

Co-writer John Lutz also shared that Sawyer dictated all the Japanese dialogue to the cast members, who then repeated it back word for word.

SNL also spoofed The Office when Rainn Wilson hosted in 2007. In his monologue, Wilson, now 58, finds the SNL cast acting like the characters on the show, and Schur said he thought that monologue “nailed” the show’s actual vibe.

And, in a meta moment, The Office actually once mimicked a famous SNL sketch. In a season 3 episode, Carell’s Michael Scott and Wilson’s Dwight perform “Lazy Scranton,” itself a parody of The Lonely Island’s iconic 2005 short "Lazy Sunday."

Schur and the Lonely Island’s Andy Samberg ultimately worked together on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which ran from 2013 to 2021.

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