DrCrowTStarwars said:

Well here is the thing when that brand of humor works in other thing the person being rude is the butt of the jokes and the joke is that the person thinks so highly of himself when really he is just a jerk and everyone knows it.

You just described David Brent. The difference in Gervais' spin on it, is that Brent as a character is such a believable slice of human life (the world is full of people just like him, I know many of them) and once you get to know the character he becomes pathetic and almost sympathetic.

Look at shows like Fawlty Towers or Blackadder for how I like seeing this sort of thing done, he seems to just insult people and the joke doesn't go any farther then that and je seems to really think that highly of himself in real life.

I can only speak for Blackadder, I haven't watched Fawlty Towers yet. Edmund Blackadder is a bad guy, but we're supposed to root for him because he's intelligent and witty. He's kind of a more sophisticated version of Dick Dastardly. When you watched Wacky Racers you never cared for the other cars to win, you wanted to see Dick win, but all of his plans backfired on him and that's what made him sympathetic.

David Brent, IMHO, is another kind of character. While Blackadder and Dastardly are fiction characters written primarily to be anti-heroes, Brent is an everyman, and again, I could go down the street and find you another David Brent, while there's no way you could find a Blackadder anywhere out there.