Office Party
Emboldened by their new notoriety, and assured that the jokes aren’t being made at their town’s expense, Scrantonians have become a city of fact-checkers for Office scenes. No one in Scranton would drive all the way to Carbondale for a hot dog! The boat pictured in the classic “Booze Cruise” episode was way too big for Lake Wallenpaupack! And the offense mentioned most: Nowhere near Scranton is there a branch of Michael’s favorite restaurant, Hooters.
To which the mayor responds: “We’ll get one!”
The apotheosis of Scranton references on prime time occurred earlier this season, when Dunder-Mifflin did some cost-cutting and the Scranton branch absorbed workers from the shuttered Stamford, Connecticut, branch. To welcome the new transplants, Michael Scott and his erstwhile sidekick Dwight made an amateurish and incredibly white-bread rap video called “Lazy Scranton.”
Reality and make-believe chase their tails again. The “Lazy Scranton” video is a parody of another parody rap video, one from Saturday Night Live, with cast members Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg. Called “Lazy Sunday,” it features two pathetically tame white wannabe gangstas who rap tough about a typical weekend day for them — seeing a movie (Chronicles of Narnia) and eating cupcakes. In this era of YouTube, “Lazy Sunday” became a video hit.
Greg Daniels knew that there were already numerous homemade variants of “Lazy Sunday” on the web. “Just about every town had its version,” he told me. “We knew of one about Muncie, Indiana. And it would be just like Michael’s character to come upon something so late.”
In “Lazy Scranton,” Michael and Dwight, garbed in woolen rap-wear watch caps (Dwight’s is hunter’s orange), gesticulate with head-pumping ’hood attitude to explain to the Stamford émigrés such mundane details as parking-lot rules and health plans. The one riff that gets repeated is something for which Scranton could not have paid as a product placement. Playing on the city’s recently revived nickname of “The Electric City” — which goes back to Scranton’s claim that it had the nation’s first electric streetcar line — the writers created the repeated tag:
They call it Scranton.
WHAT?
The Electric City!
Scranton.
WHAT?
The Electric City!
Mayor Doherty, sitting in a conference room near his office in City Hall one morning, could do nothing but laugh at the thought of the “Lazy Scranton” rap. He’d spearheaded a drive to raise $250,000 to relight a huge 40,000-light-bulb “Electric City” sign that had been dark for two decades atop of one of the town’s tallest buildings. Electric City references are everywhere in Scranton these days, from murals on highway tunnel walls to small-business names. Somehow, this TV show is helping to make Scranton a brand name. There’s been talk of building a duplicate of the Office set to attract tourists. For the first time in a while, many things seem possible in Scranton.
