Ricky Gervais, reactionary bore

You can't say that anymore and yet you just did

‘I don’t like it when a comedian just spouts his own political views and relies on the audience agreeing with him to get a round of applause,’ announces Ricky Gervais in his new Netflix Special Armageddon. For 60-minutes Gervais, clad in his usual black t-shirt and jeans get-up, tells jokes about dwarfs, gay people, ‘disabled creatures’, African babies with AIDs, Chinese people eating dogs, people pretending to be asylum seekers, people pretending to have ADHD, students taking micky mouse degrees, Greta Thunberg, homeless people (‘fucking horrible’) and the fragile and narcissistic ‘woke’ youth. Which is to say that Gervais just spouts his own political views and relies on the audience agreeing with him to get a round of applause.

Gervais’s portrayal of David Brent in mockumentary The Office (2002) was a work of comic genius. Brent, a hapless white-collar middle manager who desperately wants to be popular, cuts a pathetic but ultimately sympathetic figure. The viewer didn’t so much hate Brent as feel sorry for him; he was an uncalibrated fool but a well meaning one, hence the happy ending written for him in the Christmas Specials that brought the curtain down on the story in 2003. Gervais foolishly resurrected Brent in 2016 for a feature length spin-off, Life on the Road (2016), this time without the grounding influence of his original co-writer on The Office Stephen Merchant. All of a sudden the charm had gone out of the franchise and Brent had morphed into something genuinely tragic and repulsive, trucking in boring jokes about gays and fat people.

Expressing any form of reservation or note of disapproval about anti-woke comedy nowadays is to get oneself marked down as an invertebrate. For those of us who possess a strong enough constitution to sit through jokes that poke fun at the shibboleths of political correctness - provided they are actually funny - retorts like this don’t hold much water. But I’ve come to realise that such humour is increasingly sustained by a section of the audience being reliably ‘offended’ by it and kicking off. How else to keep the lucrative conceit going which says that rich middle aged white men telling rollicking jokes about asylum seekers are heroic truth-tellers saying the unsayable? These days Gervais’s adoring fanbase seem more enthusiastic at the prospect of upsetting their political opponents than about the material itself. And who could blame them: most of the jokes in Armageddon are hackneyed and stale - ‘Doctor, Doctor, I keep thinking I’m a pair of curtains’; ‘You are then’. Heady stuff that is indeed guaranteed to ‘annoy all the right people’.

Netflix describes Armageddon as ‘controversial takes on political correctness and oversensitivity in a taboo-busting comedy special about the end of humanity’. Yet those on the receiving end of Gervais’s barbs are hardly considered off limits by the wider culture: illegal immigrants, the homeless and transgender people are all regularly subjected to invective from government politicians and Britain’s overwhelmingly right-wing media. By all means make an off-colour joke about those groups if you wish: I’m a big boy and I know how to use the remote control. But you won’t convince me that publicly flogging these tabloid bête noires makes one a gutsy truth teller. It’s true that a disability charity condemned Armageddon before it was released on Christmas Day for a joke Gervais makes about terminally ill children. But it’s also true that Gervais is still on Netflix telling the joke, which perhaps gives a good indication of just how risqué this style of humour really is.

One of the biggest cheers from the audience during Gervais’s performance in Armageddon erupts in response to a fatuous joke about mobs pulling down statues originally put up to honour slave traders - another example of woke hypocrisy apparently. ‘He was a slave trader, pull down the fucking statue.’ ‘He built the hospital, should we pull that down too?’ ‘No, leave the hospital’. It’s certainly true that wealthy people have historically (and not just historically) tried to launder their reputations through philanthropy (and on this note Gervais enjoys boasting about how wealthy he is and how much money he donates to animals, who he prefers to humans). But you needn’t take a course in critical race theory to recognise that those who became uncontrollably rich from the slave trade might have set aside some of their tainted money for similar ends. ‘Pride and vanity have built more hospitals than all the virtues together,’ wrote the Dutch physician Bernard de Mandeville in The Fable of the Bees, his eighteenth century polemic against philanthropic hypocrisy.

It isn’t for me to tell a comedian who the ‘correct’ target of his humour ought to be - comedy is subjective after all. But then Gervais’s current shtick is of a piece with right-wing populism more generally, characterised as it is by a servility to the very power it ostensibly rails against. I’m no more required to accept Gervais’s assessment of himself as a brave heretic saying the unsayable than I am obliged to join in with the hysterical blue pencil-wielding critics who really do want to see him cancelled. As to who is currently coming out on top, Armageddon is apparently the highest grossing single stand-up performance ever, bringing in £1,410,000 for a recent show at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. Cancel culture indeed.

At one time conservatives and reactionaries would doggedly stand athwart history yelling Stop. Nowadays they need constant reassurance that they are still the plucky countercultural underdogs they imagined themselves to be in the halcyon days of their youth. Which is understandable I suppose. Nobody wants to be the angry young man whose waistband has inexorably expanded along with his list of blimpish grievances. ‘I think I am woke, but I think that word has changed,’ says Gervais. In other words it’s not him, it’s us. ‘No-one likes a white middle aged man anymore,’ laments Gervais at another point in the show. I’ve heard that one before too.

I used to enjoy Ricky Gervais but when I think of him today I always imagine some braying face demanding to know how ‘triggered’ I am by something puerile he’s said. This ‘type’ is seemingly ubiquitous at the moment: everything is geared toward getting a rise out of the libs and sticking it to the man in a way that doesn’t threaten one’s status as a servant of power (am I still allowed to say “man”? hehe - you get the gist).

The role of humour according to Gervais is ‘to laugh at bad shit to get us through it’. Which isn’t a terrible definition, though I suppose it depends on what one considers the ‘bad shit’ to be. I found much of the material in Armageddon indistinguishable from the endless bleating we hear in some quarters about the country going to the dawgs because of foreigners and queers and the young with their trendy ailments and political correctness et cetera. I can’t say I feel hysterical or offended by jokes about that stuff - soporific is more the word that springs to mind. Perhaps I should just be grateful that Gervais didn’t make an ‘Orange man bad’ joke. Maybe he’s saving those gags for his next Netflix Special when Donald Trump is President of the United States again. Important to laugh at the truly bad shit first though right.