Ricky Gervais and the Curdled Comedy of Cruelty
so edgy!
It’s sometimes possible to pinpoint the exact moment you stopped being someone’s fan. That’s certainly the case with Ricky Gervais.
When I worked for The A.V. Club a long, long time ago, I was asked if I wanted free tickets to see Ricky Gervais perform stand-up at the Chicago theater.
I wasn’t particularly familiar with Gervais’ stand-up, but, like everyone, I was a big fan of the British incarnation of The Office and found Extras both deeply sad and hilarious. I even liked the actor’s little-loved cinematic vehicles, Ghost Town and The Invention of Lying, so I happily said yes to the free tickets.
The show was preceded by a tongue-in-cheek video from a stand-up comedian I then considered my very favorite in the entire world: Louis CK. At the time, that seemed like a wonderful surprise. Needless to say, it feels much different now.
Very, very early in his set, Gervais made a really nasty, ugly, fat joke that landed very wrong. Gervais was previously slightly overweight, so when he lost that weight, he apparently considered it a peerless moral victory that gave him unlimited license to make as many fat jokes as he’d like.
My stomach sank when Gervais made that first fat joke, but I foolishly hoped that it was an anomaly, a fluke. It was not. That fat joke was followed by another and then another and another. Gervais didn’t make a fat joke or even a series of fat jokes; he had a whole fat joke block.
I had paid no money to see Gervais, yet I still felt robbed. I looked over at my wife, who shared my grim, faintly shocked expression.
I entered the Chicago Theater as a fan. That was no longer true when I left.
The material was bad enough, and the material was very bad, and very lazy and very cheap. What made it even worse was the naughty little smirk Gervais wore throughout his set. It was a way of patting himself on the back for being brave enough to make fun of fat people.
I felt like I had seen the real Gervais at that point. He got up onstage and set out to lampoon and savage the ugliness of the world and only exposed his own cruelty.
On that awful evening, I discovered the other Ricky Gervais. The Ricky Gervais I had been a fan of was a self-deprecating comic genius who created and starred in two of the funniest shows in television history.
The other Ricky Gervais is a professional asshole and troll who gets into Twitter beefs with random accounts, then performs stand-up based on those decidedly one-sided online wars between one of the most famous and powerful comic performers in the world and a mailman with 70 followers.
The other Ricky Gervais makes a point of being the world’s most insufferable atheist (no small achievement in a world where Bill Maher exists) and has photographs taken of himself being crucified for having the bravery to say that God doesn’t exist and religion sucks.
The other Ricky Gervais traded in self-deprecation for cruelty towards others, the more vulnerable the better.
The other Ricky Gervais is a bully and a hack, a force for evil in the universe, and a sad caricature of a narcissistic, deluded, egotistical celebrity.
I remember reading somewhere that Simon Pegg drew a distinction between the private Gervais, who is a good friend, a good human being, and someone capable of sensitivity and nuance, and the public Gervais, who is problematic at best and deeply embarrassing and indefensible at worst.
All we get these days is the other Ricky Gervais. The other Ricky Gervais keeps hitting new lows, but he’s never done anything as repellent as his latest special, where he makes deeply ugly, brutally unfunny anti-trans jokes rooted in an inability to see trans people as human and a sad obsession with the genitalia of the trans community.
I’m not going to repeat any of his material, but if you are morbidly curious and want to lose what little respect you have for the man and his comedy, you can check it out here.
After delivering truly repellent, extremely graphic jokes, Gervais pulls the old “I’m only having a laugh” by insisting, “Full disclosure: In real life, of course, I support trans rights. I support all human rights, and trans rights are human rights.”
Unfortunately, we know who Gervais is in real life, and that’s the man telling hateful, bigoted jokes aimed at humiliating and ridiculing a group whose rights he professes to support.
THAT is the real Gervais, and he is a monster. I don’t use that word lightly, but, like his allies J.K Rowling, Graham Linehan, and Dave Chappelle, Gervais has chosen to use his tremendous power and wealth to attack and denigrate the trans community.
These days, Gervais exclusively engages in the comedy of cruelty. He may not believe in God, but he’s going to hell all the same. It turns out that if you do enough bad jokes, you become a bad person, and at this point, Gervais is among the worst.
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