It is probably not a coincidence that some of my favorite movie and TV scenes involve cardboard boxes.  It’s probably some great, cosmic subliminal message.  What probably happened was that aliens took over a long time ago because they discovered that cardboard boxes are the best form of nutrition for them and so now they put it in everyone’s minds and all of humanity has succumbed to this lifestyle of producing and hunting down cardboard boxes that we then put in a giant pile that the UFO can come and suck them up through laser beams and whatnot.  But I am getting so distracted, and a little paranoid, by all of this talk about aliens and UFOS.  That is simply another topic for another day.

Two of my all-time favorite “cardboard boxes” themed scenes are from that TV show with Steve Carrell, The Office.  The first one is from the first season, which is definitely an awkward season (I mean, what first seasons aren’t awkward to some extent, right, as everyone is trying to figure out what the characters are like and what the show even feels like to begin with, you know?).  In the show there is this continuous rivalry between two of the salesmen, jaded youngster Jim Halpert versus the ridiculous and overly-confident Dwight Schrute, who also just so happens to be a beet farmer.  Anyway, long story short, Dwight agrees to being sealed in a cardboard box, amongst a bunch of other cardboard boxes in the warehouse, because he thinks he is going to spy on a secret conversation between some other coworkers, which was just a ruse so that Jim could put Dwight in a box for hours.  Super sad, but super hilarious at the same time.

I know it might seem a bit like overkill to rely on two scenes from the same show, but the second scene is even better and comes much later in the series, which was fortunately a lot less awkward.  In this particular scene, three of the most notoriously lame guys of the show (the boss, the beet farmer, and another tagalong who fancies himself a crooner) are running around outside practicing parkour.  This is because they had been watching YouTube videos.  Well, one of them chooses to jump off the side of a short garage on top of a refrigerator box, but it turns out said efrigerator box is empty and he falls right in.  So the last thing you hear before he hits the ground is, “Parkour!”  Once again: super sad and super hilarious.