The Office has gone down as one of television’s most hilarious sitcoms, and sometimes it was too funny to even film.
Former castmates Phyllis Smith, Angela Kinsey, and Jenna Fischer got together for their Office Ladies podcast this week and chatted about their favorite memories of the show, which made Phyllis, who played the character by the same name, remember a scene from her wedding episode.
“The one scene I had a really hard time not laughing through was … when [Steve Carell] came into the bride’s room to give me advice, and we could not get through the word ‘pungent,'” she laughed.
Steve Carell played iconic boss Michael Scott, and he went into her dressing room to offer marriage advice. When he sat down, he smelled something foul and asked, “Did you break wind?” The bride denied the accusation, and he said “Wow, that is… that is pungent.”
Despite Steve’s many years in comedy, he simply could not get through his line.
“Every time he would say ‘pungent,’ he would break out in his cackle,” she continued. “He couldn’t get through it and I couldn’t get through it. And then we hear the sound people sitting outside the door laughing, so they had to move them down the stairway, down into the bottom because every time we said ‘pungent,’ we lost it.”
Steve Carell’s Joke “Wasn’t Supposed To Stay In The Script”
In a 2020 installment of Office Ladies, director Ken Whittingham said that the joke “wasn’t supposed to stay in the script,” but it “just lived.”
“It just kind of stayed and we just shot it,” he said. “And Michael, you know, Steve was so good. He could not stop laughing. And I mean, he could not stop laughing. I’ve never seen him break like that. And we all were just laughing. It took us about an hour to get through it, because we could not stop laughing.”
In the more recent episode, Phyllis admitted that she had an extremely hard time keeping a straight face, and she had to keep it together by holding her breath.
“So if I looked a little blue in that scene, that’s the reason,” she noted.
This story’s featured image is by Kevin Winter/Getty Images.
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