Does Ricky Gervais follow his own rules for offending people?

“They are afraid of words,” says Ricky Gervais Armageddon. In his new comedy show, his ninth, which ends on Netflix next year after a world tour, he therefore takes it woke– thinking on the grain. To him, that thinking is tantamount to being hypersensitive and easily offended.

First of all, the 61-year-old British comedian says that there was a lot of fuss about his ‘comedy special’ that appeared on Netflix last year Supernature. “It was said that you can’t say those things. That is possible. I did.” It made Supernature “the best viewed special of the year”. Chuckling and triumphant: “So I’ve learned my lesson.”

Nevertheless, Gervais wants to be well understood. In other words, he likes to create space to make his offensive jokes. He sees that space in humour. Both in humanity (2018, also on Netflix) as in Supernature he teaches humor lectures. “I am a thoughtful comedian,” he says, and I want my targets to be “honest.” The problem is that people “confuse the subject with the target.” Because of that distinction, you can joke about AIDS, cancer, and the Holocaust: it depends on the purpose of the joke.

Today, people are offended because jokes are about a topic they care about, Gervais said. “It’s about personal feelings.” With which he hints at the youngest generation and specifically the transgender movement. People were angry because he used the former name of transgender Caitlyn Jenner. But I’m not transphobic, explains Gervais humanity. His comment “wasn’t about that part of her existence”: the transition itself. After which he talks at length about her former life as a successful athlete, saying as often as possible: “Bruce Jenner, as she was then called, so I am talking about years ago.”

Fair target

How do you separate subject and target in this case? Is it classic satire holding up a mirror? Is he mocking a mindset? It doesn’t look like that. Surely the target is rather the fear of words and therefore also the people with that fear: transgender people who can find so-called ‘deadnaming’ painful, dangerous and rejecting? And then the question is: is a stigmatized, marginalized group an ‘honest’ target?

Also Supernaturewhich has largely the same lines as humanity follows, opens with a lecture: a lesson in irony. “Then I say something I don’t really mean for comic effect and you laugh at the wrong thing because you know what the right thing is. So I mock an attitude.” Which he immediately demonstrates by implying twice that he doesn’t know any funny women. “Do you see what I did?”

It is a prelude to yet another transgender joke, through the distinction between old-fashioned women, “dinosaurs,” those with a uterus, and the new, those “with beards and penises.” In which he cleverly takes the floor on behalf of the transgender people and contradicts the ‘old-fashioned’ women with their objections in a dialogue and corrects ‘wrong terms’. “Are you afraid he’ll rape you in the ladies’ room?” “That she you raped! Fucking TERF whore!” (TERF stands for ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’).

The change of position makes it a clever joke. Although he emphasizes, by not holding back his laughter, how ridiculous he considers the idea of ​​”new women”. And it is difficult to maintain that he is merely mocking an attitude here.

In Armageddon Gervais uses the same formula. His opening statement, which should protect him from criticism, is more noncommittal: he sometimes has horrible thoughts, which he sometimes speaks out, but “you can’t choose your thoughts”. His eagerness to provoke is evident in the choice of subject matter for his jokes: people with disabilities, short people, transgender people, babies in Africa, people with phobias, pedophiles, Chinese, asylum seekers, homeless people, Muslims.

Also read the interview with Ricky Gervais

Fiction

Most of those jokes are just crude and follow beaten paths. It is impossible in all cases to insist that he adheres to his own rules. Like when he “proves” that he woke is. “I like illegal immigrants. Sometimes I drive to Dover.” (for those who miss the point: just to look).

Gervais says he doesn’t understand the world, and sees only new angry mobs and new dogmas in the name of progressiveness. But he is not so “thoughtful” as to immerse himself in the dogma he falls over. For Gervais, language is passive: words are only a reflection of reality. The idea that language can play an active role, a tool with which you can shape reality, is foreign to him. Because of that lack of analysis, the unwillingness to think further, his criticism stops wokethinking on the surface.

Gervais prefers another, more classic form of defense: the fact that what he says is “fiction.” After jokes about Timmy, a boy without arms and legs, he anticipates shocked reactions by showing that he can do whatever he wants with that image of the fictional Tommy. He then sketches a portrait of the boy as a rapist and racist. Snarling: “That’s the Timmy you love so much.” It is Gervais at its best: perhaps not always so thoughtful, but as shrewd as hell.

When he makes his effort to shock less compulsively, you also hear how cleverly and skillfully he sets up and develops his jokes. The most successful are the jokes where he has come up with an original twist and ends up in an opposite position. Like the joke about cultural appropriation. Mixing cultures used to be positive, he says, but now as a white woman you get criticized if you have dreadlocks. “But black people use the n-word a lot, right? We invented that!”

A recurring caveat with some jokes, such as about Muslims, is that they won’t make it to the special. But he even says that in the specials as they are on Netflix. Gervais is who he is, a witty comedian who eagerly pushes boundaries – those of others and his own.

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