And I'm not saying he's fat, but when he jumps in the air, he gets stuck jim Carey.

You know, everybody that you know, including yourself is a mind reader.

At least we all think we are.

We act that way because really there's no other way to act.

We see someone do something like look at a camera and a tribute to that act an invisible mental state, a desire and intention, A feeling like disbelief.

This is called the theory of mind.

But there's a paradox at the heart of disability that we all have because while we know that body language conveys meaning and that we can interpret that meaning and even be roughly correct a good amount of the time, we also know that it's impossible to see the whole picture that we can misinterpret and be fooled because both of those things have happened to us.

I was just wondering nicely with lee would you like to come out for a drink with me?

I haven't split up with him.

No God, I know, I know.

Yeah, yeah.

I meant as a friend, what do you mean as a friend?

This paradox in the theory of mind, our attribution of thoughts to action and our knowledge of the unreliability in that drives all of us to perform ourselves so that we can try to shape other people's theories of our mind and it's this performance and the reading of this performance that the office created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen merchant spotlights so well, the people who work at warning hog comprise a spectrum of competence on this scale.

On one side, you have Tim and Dawn who are quite sensitive mind readers able to navigate the environment of the Office with a strong sense of what others are feeling.

And on the other side, you have David Brent and Gareth who are really, really weak mind readers.

If you do go all the way with tim and you expect me to go in there afterwards, make sure he wears a condom, right sort of a rule.

In the case of Gareth, it may actually be that he's unable to read others.

Jarvis explored this idea again years later with Derek, a character who falls somewhere on the autism spectrum, a condition that's marked by inherent difficulties with theory of mind.

But in David Brent, we have a character so invested in the performance of himself, that he's blocked his own access to others feelings.

I think Brent could become more receptive and there are rare but achingly poignant flashes of that in the series, chris cough, but to really do that would require compromising his self image, which is clearly something that he's not willing to do.

The irony is that Brent can't see that a week theory of mind always makes for a weak self performance.

You can't brute force your preferred personality onto another's consciousness.

It takes two to build an identity.

Indeed, this is what makes tim the most successful performer of all on the show and the clearest evidence of this is the cruel but hilarious way that he toys with Gareth.

Could you give a man a lethal blow?

If I was forced to, I could if it was absolutely necessary.

He's able to map Gareth's mental state so well and take advantage of his weak theory of mine that he can ridicule him without gareth, even knowing that it's going on, this is a kind of psychic superpower and we all use it.

When we tell someone, for example, a white lie, we're trying to decode that person's mental state so that our performance of the lie will be successfully received.

In other words, a believable performance is one that reflects back at your partner something that's in support of their own performance of themselves.

What makes the show even more impressive, I think, and absolutely true to life is the way that it handles the other side of the paradox.

No matter where the characters fall on that spectrum of mind reading or performance, none are spared from mistakes.

It's this essential defect in the theory of mind that's a cause of deep anxiety for all of us.

And every time that unreliability is violently revealed to us the world for a brief moment becomes gibberish and the people around us opaque because this is the only tool that we have and for the most part it's done like breathing is done without conscious attention.

So when it fails, there's just no recourse it's the unflinching focus on these failures that made The Office revolutionary.

A lot of people say that cringe humor like this is hard to watch and certainly it is.

But in the same way that under our confidence in theory of mind lies an anxiety.

I think that under our cringing there's actually a deep feeling of relief.

Cringe humor privileges the moments when body language speaks in a way that is totally transparent in that moment, the embarrassment is not only palpable, it's also palpably honest, it can't be doubted.

It's a kind of trauma, a rupture that discloses a real moment of connection.

Don't make me redundant.

Please look David, I don't change your mind.

I don't want redundancy, I don't want that.

I haven't signed anything so.

Well, unfortunately not really up to you.

Okay, alright then.

Well, I'm asking, okay, please don't make redundant.

I don't think the show would be nearly as effective if it wasn't cast as a fake documentary as opposed to simply watching the characters fail and embarrass themselves as an omniscient observer.

The employees of The Office are aware of being filmed, which is to say that they're aware of you, not only performing for one another.

They're performing for us.

This is the phenomenon of the documentary and the documentary, you can observe human behavior, mind reading you and performing at you without having to reflect back your own performance, you can be alone with someone Gervais and merchant exploit this situation to activate our empathy in a uniquely powerful way.

So that when you laugh at the office, it's a laugh that rings out in the heart.

A moment of cringeworthy truth.

Mm hmm.

Hey everybody, Thanks for watching.

I really wish I could be recording this on a camera right now, but it's a little bit too late.

And my office is still really incomplete in Los Angeles and it's it's just it's just very frustrating.

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