Ricky Gervais performs his hit Netflix comedy special “Armageddon” Photo: Netflix
Ricky Gervais' latest Netflix special “Supernatural” turns out to be among streams This is the service's most popular stand-up show over the past year, the success of which was due in no small part, as the deadpan braggart himself noted, to the howls of protest that greeted him over alleged transphobia.
While the numbers for the Armageddon captured live on the show this year will be a bit tricky, Gervais can approach the New Year confident that he will once again lead the pack. At the time of writing, its third “exclusive” is among Netflix's top ten most-watched shows.
Although some critics snubbed it, Armageddon was a sensation on air (it broke the record for the highest grossings for a stand-up act at the Hollywood Bowl). And ahead of Netflix's Christmas special, there was a useful burst of controversy. A petition was created demanding the removal of materials about seriously ill children and the Make-A-Wish Foundation (“Why didn’t you want to get better?”).
The backlash won’t hurt. Viewing numbers: Jimmy Carr became a Netflix celebrity thanks to His Dark Material, which contains deliberately inappropriate and retractable material about the untold “positives” of the Holocaust (“Thousands of Gypsies killed…”).
Gervais's set is an outrageous carousel of jokes about the weak and defenseless – a joke about pedophilia here, Alzheimer's there there, with deliberately callous discussions about a disabled toddler, a child needing a motorized wheelchair, and an African child with AIDS (“Ha, “child with AIDS.” I know it's funny, I just need to understand why,” he deadpans, pointing out that at the time of recording it was still a work in progress.
The star duly comments on the fictionality of his goals and his identity and ends with a sermon: “I know that in the real world… you can have problems. People criticize you for saying certain things, thinking certain things, or even laughing at certain things. Some of you take this to heart and think, “Am I a bad person?” That's what humor is for, to laugh at bad shit to help us get through it. It's good to laugh at dark things…” He too seems like a sort of caped crusader against the worst of the “woke.” “If being woke means being a puritanical authoritarian bully who fires people for an honest opinion or even a fact, then no, I'm not woke. Fuck this! For this he receives enthusiastic approval from the audience.
You'll hear similar statements – and harsher ones – from other like-minded comics with dark humor: “It's a joke!” Frankie Boyle repeated almost wearily during his recent Lap of Shame tour. The free speech justification for such shocking tariffs is not that difficult. Some will say that Gervais is tarnishing the validity of his case by hunting down jokes that seem to have barely evolved from playground taunts. Others believe that the very idea that he is risking anything by saying the unspeakable, when he clearly could exercise his freedom to do so, makes the whole enterprise a waste. Twitter is full of people calling Gervais a comedy dinosaur, no less than a modern-day Bernard Manning.
Not long ago, people were afraid to say anything bad about Ricky Gervais. Not anymore. He's just sad Bernard Manning. And despite the bravado of that tweet, Ricky finally achieved his dream of canceling the show. A comedian for ordinary thugs and hooligans. pic.twitter.com/NEcAdNenjz
— India Willoughby (@IndiaWilloughby) December 28, 2023
Whatever debate may rage over the intellectual structure of his stunts and the specific lines he crosses, the idea that Gervais is a politically incorrect act out of step with the times is not really true.
Despite being four years away from retirement age in the UK, Gervais has stuck with his kids, or at least Gen Z (those in their teens to twenties). He has about 874,000 followers on TikTok (Carr, the king of easy-to-use gag sounds, now has over a million). And if you hold such a warped view, the social media giant will inundate you with “sick jokes” as if the world and its partner (and, apparently, men here) are in a fight (sample taboo moans include – “What do you call an autistic child with a pistol?.. Special forces”/”Why do hospitals have air conditioning? So that the vegetables are cool and fresh”). It's as if an alternative comedy revolution that resists the prejudices and bigotry of the seventies never happened.
America's new old school advertising personality is Matt Rife, 28, who amassed an army of fans on TikTok before heading to his big hit on Netflix – his first special Natural Selection, which caused an uproar in November. The offensive start involved a Baltimore restaurant owner with a nasty black eye. His companion wondered whyshe worked outside and not in the kitchen. “Yes,” he recalls joking, “but I think if she knew how to cook, she wouldn’t have that black eye.”
Cue the chorus of disapproval at Rife's trivialization of domestic violence and its sexism. “I'd fuck grandma in a heartbeat,” goes another quote from a hunky Ohioan. “Damn, being someone’s first is someone’s last, it’s great…” Riff doesn’t seem to care who he upsets: “You can’t cancel me. “I’m not your gym membership,” he grins.
Some of this material is so regressive that Rife – not Gervais – invites comparisons to Bernard Manning, who could make jokes about domestic violence in his sleep. “I used to be so fat,” he mocked one male audience member in a recorded show before his death in 2007. “If I can do this [exercise], anyone can. It's just willpower. Get up in the morning and break your bag. Then she gets up and makes a cup of tea. Manning became the personification of unreconstructed chauvinism, casual racism and anti-minority sentiment. Now his impassiveness is embodied in youthful brilliance.
Earlier this year I caught the Manchester show of Roy Chubby Brown, a purveyor of political correctness so unfiltered that he makes Gervais look like a saint. One joke, complaining about the price of gasoline, said: “If the price had been like that in 1945, we would have had six million more damn Jews walking around.”
There's something illegal about Chubby Brown. concert – it's been canceled at several venues in recent years – but what might have been secret in real life is becoming almost mainstream online.
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36-year-old American comedian Adam Friedland has a fan base of thousands thanks to his nonstop chatter with Nick Mullen on the podcast The Adam Friedland Show. The pair sparked controversy in April when The 1975 singer Matty Healy joined them to mock their imitation Chinese, Hawaiian and Japanese accents. Consider also the ableism, stereotypes and non-PC clowning that American comedian and YouTuber Brandon Rogers (who has 6.58 million subscribers on YouTube and 2.5 million on TikTok) does in his videos and skits, and it's like respect and pride. restraint is being consigned to the dustbin of history.
It is tempting to extrapolate from the fact that today's youth – reportedly more stressed and suffering from mental health problems than their predecessors, according to a recent report by The Economist – are becoming very tired of progressive idealism. Especially men; A recent Change Research in America study published by Teen Vogue found that young men are more likely to identify as conservative than their female counterparts. Like a transgressive smoking renaissance, perhaps this generation's newfound love for old-school jokes is simply a case of rebelling against the absurd overload of strictures imposed by their peers.
Cultural change seems imminent. While Armageddon won't go down in the annals as a comedy masterclass, it may well mark the moment the Awakening was given the marching orders.
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