If You Grew Up In The ’00s, You’ll Remember These 25 Seriously Messed-Up Things We All Lived Through

On Rainn Wilson’s Soul Boom podcast, Angela Kinsey revealed the original script even had Angela invoking Jesus to judge Oscar — a joke she asked Greg Daniels to remove because it felt “one-note” and stereotypical.

Why it mattered (and why we forgot): These jokes shaped how an entire generation internalized queerness — as something inherently embarrassing, mockable, or a sign of weakness in a straight man. They reinforced harmful stereotypes and taught kids that mocking LGBTQ+ people was socially acceptable, not just on the fringes, but in the most popular shows on television. Today, those jokes age like milk, but in the ’00s, they were a systemic source of social shame.