Who is the most annoying character in the Office?
08.06.2025 14:01
Dwight lives in a world where he’s the hero of an epic adventure story, in which his least decisions are crucially important.
But I believe I can make a far stronger case for someone else.
Andy, when he’s being manipulative, is chilly, and so his attempts to be friendly come across as calculating, and his snide jokes about Dwight come across as bitchy.
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Michael: Ah! You must be Andy Bernard.
Andy: I'll be the Number Two guy here in Scranton in six weeks. How? Name repetition, personality mirroring, and never breaking off a handshake. I'm always thinking one step ahead. Like a carpenter that makes stairs.
Angela’s subconscious longing for a fulfilled life with a good partner is perfectly fine; what’s not fine is her mean-minded sniping about other people who actually have that, because she only snipes about them because she doesn’t have it.
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It doesn’t help that, a few episodes before ‘The Merger’, Dwight had tried and abjectly failed to wrest the management job from Michael, but Michael has already conditionally forgiven him—so he doesn’t need to hear Andy hinting that Dwight can be less than loyal, because he already knows that, but he also wants to think the best of Dwight, and not have some new guy stirring bad blood.
[Cut to Michael in a talking head segment]
Nor is it Jim and/or Pam.
Instead, Andy epically loses his shit, starts yelling, and kicks a wastebin across the office. And nobody except Jim even raises an eyebrow, because they’re all used to Andy’s explosions of rage when his sense of propriety is violated.
And he punches a hole in the wall.
Once he’s got Erin back, the next thing that happens is that his family loses its money and has to sell the family yacht, which he’s never been allowed to captain. Being Andy, he drives with Erin to the harbour, personally commandeers the yacht and sails it to its buyer in the Bahamas, leaving Erin behind. It doesn’t even occur to him to ask her if she’d like to go along, which she admits she would have.
Michael: Huh.
Andy: [smarmy] Duh. Which is why I was just joking about doing that.
Michael: Oh.
So we can’t exactly take Dwight at his word; but, on the other hand, because Dwight adheres so faithfully to his peculiarly archaic and harsh code of ethics (most of the time), there is something oddly noble about him, even at his most idiotic. When things don’t go the way he wants them to, we may well be pleased that some of his more petty and idiotic schemes get defeated; but we might also feel sorry for him, because he is, so often, the architect of his own humiliation.
Michael: [annoyed] No. I don't want to do any of that.
Because Andy isn’t as smart as he thinks he is, he fails to prevent them from pooling their sales, and they quickly make enough sales to meet the target.
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When he was making an effort to be a better man, he did become more genuinely friendly and helpful. But there’s something queasily inauthentic about him: some part of him that is always pretending.
But this is one of the few times that Andy lets himself be the butt (!) of the joke.
So, from the get-go, Angela is someone whose desire is at odds with her sense of herself—and that’s not annoying, that’s pitiable.
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Angela thinks she’s ‘virtuous’, but we see from almost her earliest appearances that she isn’t. She’s carrying on a secret thing with Dwight, and apparently she’s rather good at sex. (Which is, of course, not a vice, but from the way Angela talks about other people, you’d think she thinks it is. Dwight describes her as ‘energetic’ and ‘flexible’.)
In ‘The Return’, a combination of Andy’s last-ditch effort to ingratiate himself with Michael, and Jim’s exasperation with Andy’s mannerisms (such as loudly singing the Cranberries’ ‘Zombie’ at his desk), creates a situation which pushes Andy over the edge.
Dwight does not exactly occupy the same moral universe as the rest of us.
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In my view, the most annoying character in The Office, by far, is Andy Bernard.
Michael: Aloha and welcome!
Angela’s fortunes slowly decline until, late in season 9, she is genuinely pathetic. Watch her in the scene when her marriage ends, as her gay husband Senator Lipton comes out in a press conference: her reactions are priceless, going from smiling, loyal wife, through disgruntlement, then a look of pure Oh you have to be f***ing kidding me, and finally, when Lipton confesses that he’s really in love with his chief of staff, Angela gasps with disbelief and appears to be about to throw up. (Angela Kinsey, her actor, was wonderful in the role: apparently she’s basically the complete opposite of her character.)
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Andy is annoying partly because privileged people shouldn’t be so f***ing clueless.
Andy: [looking into the bag] Nifty!
Interesting question, but I think I have a solid answer.
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Eventually, Michael realises that he has been unjust to Dwight, and that he wants Dwight back. Unfortunately, at this point, an already jittery Andy makes his last attempt to be Michael’s best buddy.
When the two branches merge, and Andy comes to Scranton in season 3’s ‘The Merger’, he blithely tells the camera how he plans to gain power:
Andy: Wait up. Where are you going? Do you want me to come with?
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Andy: And you must be Michael Scott. Aloha and... hello.
Michael: Oh, no.
I know, I know, it’s subjective. Some people probably find Andy endearing. An unloved child, fretting in the shadow of his handsomer, more talented brother (who is after all Josh Groban.)
It does not go well:
Andy ruefully but pluckily agrees to go ahead with the butt-tattooing, although I personally think that that the writing team was being soft on his character because it was his turn to be sympathetic—but never mind. He insists on having the tattoo, even though Jim assures him that nobody expects him to, and at the last minute, the office staff take pity on him and switch the tattoo from an insulting one to a picture of a dog with ‘Nard’ written on it, so it’s his old Cornell nickname, ‘Nard Dog’. Andy ends up feeling accepted.
In the end, unable to function in the regular world, Andy gets to retreat to his beloved Cornell. Which he probably should never have left.
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Michael: [snapping] No, just stop. Stop. Stop doing it. You're going to drive me crazy.
On returning, he calmly asks for and accepts all his paychecks and the bonus cheque he hasn’t earned, and then causes Jan to cancel an important sale made in his absence when he annoys her about a minor technical point—the sales team had given her a price they technically weren’t entitled to give her without first clearing it with him, which they couldn’t do, because he was in the Bahamas.
They’re relatively normal, funny and sympathetic, unless you’re a dick. So that’s them out.
Michael Scott needs to be liked. Dwight doesn’t care whether he’s liked. Angela just doesn’t like people. Kevin rather endearingly assumes that he is liked. Jim and Pam and Darryl are naturally likeable.
Andy: [who has no idea what Michael was talking about] … You said... [makes gibberish noises]
Sure enough, after pointlessly taking a dump on David Wallace’s car (so as to ‘burn my bridges’), Andy barges into a young girl’s audition and starts belting out the ‘Cornell Fight Song’ before finally collapsing before the pitiless unenthusiasm of the judges, and bursting into self-pitying tears.
But to me, Andy is the character you most enjoy getting punched.
He then stays in the Bahamas for three months but doesn’t tell his employers that he’s doing so, leaving the office to run itself (which it does with extreme success). While he’s gone, he tweets continually but only emails his girlfriend twice.
In the end, once he had the job he wanted, the real Andy had to re-emerge. Privilege let him be his truest self: convinced he had the right to be the boss, but only barely competent as one, and fatally too uninterested be a good one.
It underwrites every aspect of him. Andy tends to coast through life on his first impressions of people, because his smug self-confidence tells him that they’re correct. On Jim’s first day in Stamford, Jim has a tuna sandwich for lunch, so Andy assumes that tuna is Jim’s favourite food, and immediately nicknames him ‘Big Tuna’, although tuna is not Jim’s favourite food. Later on, he assumes that Pam, too, must be sick of eating tuna because, in his mind, Jim wants to eat nothing else. Pam, for her part, is merely baffled.
Andy: Just listen, I forgot to tell you the plan for this Saturday. You, me, bars, beers, buzzed. Wings. Shots. Drunk. Waitresses, hot. Football: Cornell/Hofstra. Slaughter. Then a quick nap at my place and we'll hit the tiz-own.
Andy: Which is like, "Right on." And Pam was like "blah blah blah" and you were like "Yeah, psht." [smugly] Nailed it.
In season 8, Andy decides that he simply has to get back together with Erin, even though he’s engaged to the lovely Jessica. Being Andy, he drives down to Florida to get Erin back, and then breaks up with Jessica on the way home, during her bridal shower.
Michael: You know who I really like, is this guy Andy Bernard. He has got this… very likable way about him.
Andy correctly identifies Dwight as his main ‘rival’ for Number Two Guy in Scranton, and spends the next few episodes not very subtly trying to undermine him, and equally unsubtly trying to get Michael to be his best buddy.
Unfortunately for Andy, he does not naturally project warmth, the way Michael does—and indeed, the rather weird way Dwight does. (In Dwight’s case it’s more like ‘fervent heat’.)
Andy: [coming up to them] Feel ya, dawg.
However, Andy on his best behaviour is Andy out of focus. He veers between being Michael Lite, Mediocre Jim, or The Guy Angela Got With To Make Dwight Jealous.
Michael: [hard stare] What did I say?
Sure enough, this is what Andy does—and it works on Michael, but it doesn’t work on Pam, who sees him doing it to Michael.
Eventually, in season 9, Andy’s love of showbiz trumps his mediocre interest in his job, and, against everyone’s advice, he decides to quit Dunder Mifflin and audition for a reality show. None of the other employees think this a good idea, but the truest and most withering verdict comes from Phyllis:
In the basically humane and compassionate environment of The Office, this is enough to redeem her. From then on, Angela’s fortunes improve.
And now, Michael complains to us that Andy likes him ‘too much’ and is ‘always up in my bidnis.’
That’s when Oscar, the former lover of her former husband, invites her to stay in his place until she gets her life sorted out. Angela accepts help, almost immediately breaks down and, for the first time in the show, is completely honest with someone else, tearfully confessing to Oscar that she loves Dwight.
Andy only comes back into focus in season 8, where he becomes office manager. Here, he becomes a little more sympathetic because of the trials he’s put through. The best example is ‘The Incentive’, in which he introduces a scheme whereby if the office makes enough sales, he’ll reward them. The top reward is that he’ll let them tattoo whatever they want on his butt.
Michael: [turning to him] Yeah, do you?
Check out her silent reactions in the background of the scene where Andy and Michael first meet. We can see that she gets Andy’s number within seconds:
Andy has put a ringtone on his phone of himself singing ‘Rockin’ Robin’ in four-part harmony, which he can’t resist showing off. Jim decides to prank him. Pam helps Jim to steal Andy’s phone and hide it in the ceiling above Andy’s desk, and then Pam and Jim take turns to ring it. This, predictably, drives Andy up the wall.
When Jim attempts to prank Andy the way he pranked Dwight, by embedding Andy’s stapler in Jello, it backfires horribly. Dwight got haughty and pompous and made comically unreasonable demands that Jim be fired, which amused Jim no end and which is exactly the kind of thing he expects Andy to do.
A couple of episodes later, she’s dishevelled and dejected, she’s being evicted from her apartment and her beloved cats are being taken away, and she’s sneaking vodka into her giant soft-drink cup.
Dwight has been fired (long story), and now works at Staples. Michael notices that Dwight did a lot of little things around the office that made it a nicer place, and is already missing him. Pam points out that Dwight not only watered the plants but arranged the toys on Michael’s desk.
Phyllis: Andy sings beautifully. And he's really good at dancing. He's a good speaker. But there's just something there you don't want to look at.
He should know better. With his preppy background and his Ivy League education, you’d think Andy would at least have more manners, but his sense of manners is confined to pointless instructions about how to eat food at his disastrous garden party (which the others have to rescue for him: when the gang are all relaxing at the end, and Darryl is cooking on the grill which Andy specifically told him not to bring, Darryl offers Andy a cheeseburger, and Andy finally relaxes, instead of yearning after the approval of his asshole father).
The enduring feature of Andy’s character, in my view, the one that persists through all his character development and un-development, is his sense of entitlement.
Michael: Really? That was very nice of him. We need more attitude like that around the office.
But Andy thinks he deserves to be liked, and that if people refuse to like him, he can make them like him by tricks and hacks, and when they fail, by plain old sucking up. When he is thwarted, he typically reacts by either exploding with rage or bursting into tears.
Michael: Um.
When he’s not being subjected to routine indignities (like in season 3’s ‘Beach Games’, where he falls into the lake in his sumo suit and spends the rest of the episode drifting helplessly on his back, with everyone ignoring his cries for help), he’s completely failing to see that Angela doesn’t love him. When that’s ended he’s courting Erin, which he does without ever telling Erin that he used to be engaged to Angela. When Erin’s no longer with him and is with Gabe, he drives himself and others nuts trying to win her back—like in season 7’s ‘Viewing Party’, where he ingests large quantities of Gabe’s powdered seahorse in attempt to give himself ‘virility’, and then spends much of the rest of the episode throwing up.
Andy goes off to anger management classes, which he claims he’ll be able to finish in less than the allotted time, and when he comes back he is indeed less angry.
Oh yeah. About the Cornell thing.
Andy: Michael, thank you for welcoming me to your little kingdom, Mike.
However, to everyone else, including us, Dwight is a paper salesman who also runs a beet farm.
It also has something to do with Ed Helms’ tight smirk and narrow, wary eyes, and Andy’s slightly too-loud voice, and irritating hamminess, such as his fondness for fake Cockney accents.
Andy: [seething] Fine. I'll just sit at my desk and be quiet. Sorry I annoyed you with my friendship. [Andy's phone rings] Excuse me. [to the rest of the office] And I'm also sorry that a lot of people here for some reason think it's funny to steal someone's personal property and hide it from them. Here's a little newsflash! It's not funny! In fact, it's pretty freakin' unfunny! Oh, my GOD!
Angela’s great vice is not that she’s judgemental, or hypocritical, or prissy, although she is all those things, at various times.
Dwight sets up his own quite stringent standards of failure and success, and at his best, he at least tries to live by them. Which is perhaps why Jim and Pam end up liking him, and consider him a friend. And why, in the end, he considers them as friends—and gives up a dowry that includes a walk-in freezer’s worth of bull semen, because the one he really loves is Angela.
You can watch the whole exchange here. If you’re an obsessive nerd.
The stage is set.
Her great vice, which in season 9 she abjectly owns up to, is pride, which encompasses all those things.
Andy: [trying and failing to mirror Michael] Oh, no.
Andy: Absolutely.
Arguments could be made for a number of other characters. And I might agree with such arguments, as applied to Todd Packer, or Nellie Bertram, or Deangelo Vickers.
Andy: [cautiously] Hello.
Dwight is only superficially annoying.
What Andy got out of it was the sense that he’s better than other people because he went to Cornell.
Apologies to anyone who saw Angela’s picture in the preview, and assumed that this answer would be about her.
Like Phyllis said: there’s just something there you don’t want to look at.
Michael: They are nifty! They're nifty gifties.
Nothing wrong with that. My dad went to Harvard, and even me saying that feels like me ‘doing an Andy’. What matters, though, is not what college you went to, but what you got out of the experience.
Andy went to Cornell, one of the Ivy League colleges, and he seldom lets people forget this.
It’s not Angela.
Michael: A-ha-ha-ho. Very good! Welcome to our little kingdom. Ah, we have a bag of nifty gifties for you.
It’s not Dwight, either.
Michael: [preparing to go to get Dwight back] Pam, I have a mission to accomplish. Make sure this party gets rolling and I will be back shortly.