Less than two minutes into his new Netflix special, Ricky Gervais warns the audience that he will be deploying irony throughout his set. “That’s when I say something I don’t really mean for comic effect,” he explains and you laugh at the wrong thing because you know what the right thing is, as a way of satirising attitudes.
He then suggests that the “worst thing you can say today, [to] get you cancelled on Twitter, death threats... is ‘Women don’t have penises,’ right? Now, no one saw that coming. You won’t find a 10-year-old tweet of someone saying, ‘Women don’t have penises.’ You know why? We didn’t think we f**king had to!”
Gervais’s attempt to fend off criticism with his irony warning has not been completely successful. One American LGBTQ+ group condemned the show as “full of graphic, dangerous, anti-trans rants masquerading as jokes”. The Independent’s critic accused Gervais of “helping to perpetuate a system of reactionary conservatism that has been in place since most of us were born”.
Gervais now joins the likes of Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart and Jimmy Carr who have faced criticism — and in the case of Chappelle, physical attack — from those offended by jokes.
I watched Gervais’s Netflix special. It didn’t seem to me that he was mocking trans people. He was actually making a pointed and funny observation about our evolving concept of what the definition of a woman is. The joke, in other words, was on us. That’s why Gervais is different from comedians from the Seventies and Eighties such as Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson, whose comedy felt laced with genuine bigotry.
The worst of those comics amplified and endorsed hateful attitudes towards women and minorities. Even his harshest critics would not suggest that was Gervais’s intention.
If there is a criticism that can be levelled at Gervais’s stand-up material, it is not that it is offensive but that it is lazy and self-satisfied. I could have predicted the subjects and themes of his new show without having seen a second of it because they are always the same: there is no God, animals are better than humans, here are a few tweets people have sent me and isn’t cancel culture terrible, but I’m loaded so f**k you.
Gervais makes a great play of being brave in saying things that can’t be said — most controversially on trans people — but if he was truly brave and honest he would admit that his best work, The Office and Extras, was back when he was with Stephen Merchant. He did also strike gold with the hilarious, heart-breaking After Life, which finds humour in that darkest of subjects, death.
Those shows remind us that comedy at its best is neither cosy nor comfortable; it can explore and illuminate our taboos and obsessions from race, class and religion to sex and death. That is what we see in the comedy of Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Chris Rock and, sometimes, Ricky Gervais, all very different performers but all believers that the comedy stage should not be a safe space.
In other news...
The highlight of my week was the news that Bruce Springsteen, above, and the E Street Band are embarking on a world tour next year. I can mark the seasons of my life through Springsteen tours.
It is almost six years to the week since they last played London. The first time I saw him in 1988, I was a teenager in Luton, in 1992 I skipped graduation day to see him, and in 1996 I had just started my first job. In 2009 my then-girlfriend agreed to come with me to see him at Glastonbury and then Hyde Park — the next day that I was convinced she was the right woman for me.
During lockdown I would watch YouTube videos of him performing in Hyde Park and gawp at the huge crowd and wonder when such gigs might return. I am already counting down the days till the stage lights dim and I am with the faithful joyfully dancing in the dark.
