Ricky Gervais broke my heart
Twenty years ago The Office was my favourite piece of pop culture, now its co-creator is one of the world's most successful (yet, terrible) comedians.
In the first minute of his new special SuperNature Ricky Gervais launches into an almost word-for-word plagiarism of an old (yet brilliant) Stewart Lee joke where he explains to the audience what irony means.
Yet, when Lee did it there was a sort of gleeful self-sabotage of him arbitrarily dividing the room into those that understood his comedy and those that didn’t. While with Gervais telling the same joke it is implied that this misunderstanding of the word is REAL and those that don’t understand are not present. They are “woke”, “politically correct” and on Twitter somewhere.
He then segues clumsily into a “joke” about Eddie Izzard (one of the most perfect British stand-ups behind maybe only Billy Connolly) being a great “actress” and we’re off…
We are not even three minutes in and we are already teed up for a gruelling hour about trans people, his life on twitter (repeating and laughing at his own tweets), people getting cancelled (unfairly) and, of course, more trans people.
Throughout the set there is this atmosphere that Gervais is being naughty and the offended tweets are being written as we watch and that’s somehow the point of this whole exercise… to generate tweets that he can perform (and laugh at) in the next special.
There is a couple of jokes that work when he talks about animals (which is reminiscent of his first special). There’s a smattering of okay constructions (including one about reincarnation) that he’s lifted directly from his own podcast and radio show (sometimes originally said by Karl Pilkington or Stephen Merchant).
He then just ticks through his usual: Aids, gay sex, Hitler, being rich, religion, abortion… the bit on Aids is almost unbearable (not for being shocking, which none of this is, just so obliviously unfunny).
At about the half-way point he does a long, cliched bit about having his prostate examined. This is the level.
But it all leads back to people being offended and the evils of the world trying to silence us.
The irony is Gervais seems to think that this censorship is some sort of threat on comedy… while saying what he likes on a massive Netflix platform for millions of dollars.
To be fair it builds up a frothy momentum of Gervais laughing and people enjoying the spectacle of that. And when he relaxes and down gears to talking about his own life growing up in Reading I laughed (for the only time) 90 seconds before the special ends.
At one point he essentially admits that he isn't transphobic in "real life". The trans stuff is mostly copied from his own previous special (and he was right: it has attracted the most attention in the reviews and on social media). Someone described Netflix comedy as algorithmic and without the trans uproar I imagine there would be little else to say about the special in headline form. A safe controversy is what Netflix seems to want and endless trans jokes is what they get in return.
Second, the trans material, I believe, is for his rabid fan base who feel like they can't speak their mind, particularly on this issue. He's giving them catharsis and wrapping it up as "edgy comedy". Gervais has talked a lot about wanting the right kind of fans who laugh for the right reasons (and in his sitcom Extras lambasted the idea of the catchphrase) but in 2022 he is a kind of dancing monkey (as he has said if a man can identify as a woman he will identify as a chimp) wheeling out almost the same material for people every year who just want to hear the words said out loud. Now, that isn’t a good state of affairs. He's offering some strange public service for idiots.
And though Gervais is at pains to spell out (while on stage) that comedy is subjective, his fans are insistent that if you don’t laugh at his comedy then you just don’t like jokes (or freedom of speech or women’s safety).
This would all be fine, if I wasn’t historically such a massive Ricky Gervais fan.
I had to rewatch the original UK version of The Office last year to see... well, just in case the dreadful Derek and After Life series and all the awful stand-up tarnished his original co-creation. But it is meticulous and hilarious. We weren't all crazy. Gervais (when with Merchant) was truly brilliant.
I have listened to the YouTube rips from his sessions on “tinpot radio station” XFM (with Merchant and Pilkington) countless times. There is actually a whole community on the Internet that listen to them to lull themselves to sleep.
So what happens when one of your comedy heroes is stranded in his sixties cackling on stage at his own terrible material (to raucous applause)? In an age of endless nostalgia and legacy sequels we want people/stories/franchises to be infinite and untarnished. If we take that too seriously Gervais has already torpedoed The Office with its own unwatchable legacy sequel David Brent: Life On The Road a few years ago.
I just wish I could stop myself from watching these comedy specials every time they come out.
Netflix has already commissioned Ricky’s next one (called Armageddon) so I look forward to more of the same jokes (and my same reactions) around this time next year.
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