Here's How Much Jim Probably Spent On All His Pranks In 'The Office'
If the best things in life are free, then why does FedEx charge you a grand to ship your coworker’s desk to them in Roswell, New Mexico?
Over the course of The Office’s nine seasons, no running joke was heightened to more impractical extremes than Jim Halpert’s endless, expensive torment of his deskmate and arch nemesis Dwight Schrute. What starts with a simple and timeless “Stapler in the Jello” gag snowballs into some of the most convoluted, painstaking and expensive tricks that would make even Kevin McCallister blush at the sheer creativity of Jim’s sadism. As we watched the Office writers strain to top themselves with each increasingly elaborate prank, many of us wondered, “Where would Jim be if he instead devoted all the time and money he’s wasted making Dwight’s life hell to making his own life better? Which professional sports team would he own then?”
Eight years ago, one Redditor, inspired by Jim’s ability to waste an entire day devising something inconsequential, went through each and every prank Jim ever pulled on The Office (including in the deleted scenes, where you’ll find the aforementioned Roswell desk gag) and came to the conclusion that, over the show’s entire run, Jim spent at least a combined $5,590 on all his schemes. That’s like half of Michael’s annual salary just to piss off Dwight.
“Most of Jim's pranks took a lot of time and planning, but cost him no money,” user /u/jmorley14 wrote explaining the project. “Also, many things used in his pranks did not have to be purchased by him (such as printing something off).” They estimated that the most expensive prank Jim ever pulled was when he and Pam learned morse code in the Season Six episode “The Cover-Up,” incurring costs not just from the lessons, but from the nanny the two hired so that the pair of adult parents could devote their limited free time and very limited budget to briefly upsetting a difficult coworker. Going off of /u/jmorley14’s spreadsheet breakdown, the presumably four-week-long endeavor totaled $3,120 when all is added up. Thank god they didn’t put that money into something stupid like Cece’s college fund.
Since the only prank wherein the cost is explicitly stated is the famous identity theft cold-open, much of this list was based off of estimates and pricing information readily available on the internet – for instance, we can’t know for sure how Jim acquired enough Legos to build Dwight’s entire desk, but anyone who has bought a birthday gift for a niece or nephew recently knows that $500 is conservative for that kind of brick volume.
Also omitted from the list are any pranks played on characters besides Dwight, though, since Dwight was obviously Jim’s favorite victim, that probably wouldn’t move the needle much.
Overall, that $5,590 figure may be a cautious underestimate, but the real expense in all of Jim’s antics was the time and effort spent torturing a coworker who only ever wanted to do the best at his job, then go home to his beets. Maybe if Jim spent less time framing Dwight for his murder, he could be a farmer, too.
