Nick Offerman, the actor who plays Ron Swanson on the NBC series “Parks and Recreation,” has been around for years, but few of us noticed because he wasn’t yet “Ron Swanson.” He was simply Nick Offerman, a struggling actor with a boat-building side job that bounced around in bit parts in a series of movie and television shows. In fact, for much of his career, Offerman went up against Rainn Wilson for the same parts, and the two developed a friendship during those auditions. That’s how Offerman landed the job of Ron Swanson: Rainn Wilson put him in touch with Greg Daniels, the showrunner of “The Office,” while Daniels was developing “Parks and Recreation.”

Pre-”Parks and Recreation,” very few of us might have known that he was married to Megan Mullally (they met while doing a stage production together in 2000), but for the most part — despite 45 roles or so before landing “Parks and Recreation” — no one had a clue who he was, even though he was an occasional presence in our television lives.

Here are the highlights of his pre-Swanson career, with a NSFW warning on the last slide, which depicts his full-frontal presence on “Deadwood” back in 2004.

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As an aficionado of cheap, puerile humor, I always enjoy a good “That’s what she said” joke. The phrase has gone from “Wayne’s World” to tired irrelevance to ironic re-relevance thanks to Michael Scott’s overuse of it on “The Office.” In this Funny or Die sketch, Megan Mullally and Thomas Lennon (of “Reno 911!” and “The State”) create a history in which “That’s what she said” originated from a single slutty chick. Basically, it’s four minutes of different variations of the joke, and I therefore love it. Trust me, you don’t get the career I’ve had without dealing with a lot of genitals.