Jim Halpert from The Office might be your favorite character on the show. He’s the everyday guy who just wants to get through his day, but has to deal with Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute. One of the best things about him, though, is that he’s an amazing prankster. Whether he’s putting Dwight’s stapler in jell-o or covering his computer in post-it notes, Jim is funny man.
With all of the great pranks on The Office, we wanted to take a look at what we could learn from Jim Halpert about comedy.
Topical humor is the best kind of humor
Jim doesn’t just pull random pranks on anyone. He pulls pranks on people who deserve them (or at least deserves them in his mind). He takes advantage of opportunities as they arise, whether it’s Toby leaving after being promoted or Kelly asking him out. This kind of topical humor is often the funniest kind because it feels more natural and less forced.
You have to make people laugh to be successful
Jim knows that he has to be funny to keep his job at Dunder Mifflin, so he pulls pranks regularly and makes sure that everyone
“This is my blog. I will write about comedy. And whatever else I feel like writing about.”
That’s how John Krasinski introduced his blog in 2008, the year he became famous as Jim Halpert, the heartthrob paper salesman and prankster on “The Office.”
Krasinski wrote his first blog post while he was performing at a comedy club in Chicago, where he’d landed after graduating from Brown University.
“I’m here to tell you that I have no idea what I’m doing,” he wrote. “Which is why I’m starting this blog.”
He went on: “What am I going to write about? It could be anything really. It could be about these shows, or something that happened with my friends. Or maybe just what music I’ve been listening to lately.”
More than a decade later, Krasinski is still writing about those things — and more. On Instagram, Twitter and his newly revived blog, Some Good News (SGN), the actor has become an unlikely beacon of positivity and entertainment during the coronavirus pandemic. The show’s premise is simple: good news only. He’s had Tom Hanks as a guest and reunited the cast of Hamilton for a virtual performance of ”
John Krasinski, who played Jim Halpert on “The Office,” has been making the press rounds lately to promote his new movie The Hollars. But in a recent interview with Esquire he also reflected on some of the lessons he learned from his time playing Jim, and what that means for comedy as a whole.
“I think the first thing I learned is that comedy is all about tone,” Krasinski said. “If you look at The Office, the funny thing is it wasn’t ever jokes that were written. It was the tone that was set. A lot of the show was just people talking over each other.”
Krasinski said this is really true of any successful TV show: it’s never about jokes, but rather about finding the right tone and sticking with it.
“A lot of shows you see on television, they get the joke down,” he said. “They have the funny joke at the end, or they have that line that will make people laugh. But if you don’t have that tone right, if you don’t have people invested in your characters and invested in your story, you’re going to fail.”
As an example of this, Krasinski pointed to one episode of The Office where Michael Scott has
The actor who played Jim Halpert on The Office is named John Krasinski. He also directed, produced, and starred in a film called Promised Land. It’s a drama that deals with fracking, and I think it’s a pretty good movie. I don’t know if this is an interesting or relevant fact, but I am the person writing this blog so I get to decide what facts make it in.
Krasinski wasn’t always known as Jim Halpert though. Before he was on The Office, he was just another guy working at an office. Not even any kind of “the office”! Just a normal office, one where he was not a fully realized human being with hopes and dreams that would be fulfilled over time by his eventual success in show business. No, instead he was just another guy working at an office who was stuck behind the reception desk for whatever company that office belonged to because he probably hadn’t paid his dues yet (I don’t know John Krasinski personally; maybe he did pay his dues).
In any case, Krasinski was working up front when Steve Carell walked in to audition for Michael Scott. According to the Wikipedia article about Jim
“The Office” was a show about a paper company in Pennsylvania. The show followed the day to day lives of the people who worked at Dunder Mifflin.
One character, Jim Halpert, was a sales rep for the company. His job was to sell paper (and various other office supplies) to businesses in and around Scranton.
Jim Halpert was played by John Krasinski, an actor from Boston who had previously done improv comedy at Improv Asylum in Boston.
John Krasinski is also known for his role as Jack Ryan in Amazon’s “Jack Ryan” series, and his directorial debuts with “Away We Go” and “The Hollars”.
He has been nominated for several awards over the course of his career, including two Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe nomination.
Jim Halpert was the most talented comic actor on The Office.
I understand that statement will be controversial to many fans of the show. After all, Steve Carell won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Michael Scott and Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey both published books about their time on the show in which they credit Carell as the glue that held things together.
But if you go back and watch old episodes of The Office, you’ll see that it is John Krasinski’s Jim Halpert who is consistently the funniest character – often times while saying nothing at all. It’s his subtle physical comedy and facial expressions that give Jim Halpert such a strong comedic voice.
Krasinski himself has commented on how much fun he had doing physical comedy on the show – often times just improvising during scenes. He did this to such a degree that many of his signature bits became known by crew members as “Jim Things.”
Jim Halpert is a fictional character from the American television series The Office. He was portrayed by John Krasinski. One of the main characters, Jim appears in most episodes and serves as the show’s everyman.
Jim Halpert was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania to Gerald and Barbara Halpert (née Vance). He is one of three children; his brother Tom lives in Austin, Texas, and his sister Lee lives in Tallahassee, Florida. His mother died of cancer when he was a child. He also has two nephews and two nieces (whose names are unknown) via his sister Lee.
Jim attended Scranton High School and was captain of the basketball team during his senior year. He also played soccer in high school; he is a fan of Manchester United F.C., once sporting a Wayne Rooney-style haircut. Jim has revealed that he “never really excelled at anything except maybe making people laugh”. He had a crush on Pam Beesly since the age of 15, but did not act on it as she was dating Roy Anderson and because he was too shy. He graduated from high school in 1997 and then attended Indiana University at Bloomington with Ryan Howard for one semester before dropping out to pursue his career
