At his very best, Ricky Gervais does cold misanthropy with an effortless flair. The British comedian excels at scathing, mean-spirited humour, his sets brimming with danger and the thrill of illicit ideas. His excitable, passionate delivery pulls the viewer in, but thereโs a twisted subtext to the joke that is often discomfiting. Itโs both satire and not: cynical, perverse, rude, piercing in its attacks while at the same time revelling in the cruelty. The malice has a purpose, but you also suspect heโs perhaps having a little too much fun with it. Gervais walks that tightropeโso fundamental to dark comedyโwith razor-sharp clarity, knowing intuitively when to push and when to pause and relent.
Thatโs not the Ricky Gervais we get on Armageddon. As on his last two specialsโincluding the terrible, culture wars-obsessed SuperNatureโyou get the impression that this is a Gervais who is spending way too much time on the internet, his brain scrambled by all that doom scrolling on X/Twitter. His judgement clouded by social-media brain rot, heโs become obsessed with โslam-dunkโ takes on contemporary progressive politics, โwokenessโ, offense, political correctness, and all those assorted buzzwords.
This stuff was never particularly original or funny, but itโs 2023 now, and weโre all just bored of it. Itโs become a fixation for a specific type of comedian: the blunt motormouths of the 1990s and 2000s, rebelling against the PC culture of their time, often to great success. Then the world moved on, as it tends to do. The comedy stage expanded to contain more voices, become more inclusive. These guys though, remain tethered to those dated notions still. No quarter given to nuance, no consideration for changing socio-political contexts. Gervais falls into the same trap, complaining incessantly here about how no oneโs allowed to say certain things anymore. And then, five seconds later, he goes on to say those very things. Itโs exhausting; weโve been getting the same routine for years. Take a break, man.
Honestly, regardless of oneโs personal politics, the problem is one of creative self-limitation. Why not do something more interesting, something insightful that hasnโt been done a thousand times already? On television, Gervaisโs work as a writer and actor has been daring, accomplished, and it feels unburdened (relatively) by these obsessions that his standup is built around. Here, heโs practically frothing at the mouth after every joke, like a toddler whoโs just learnt a dirty word.
โDid that offend you?!โ he keeps asking the crowd, daring them to say yes, a cheeky leer plastered on his face. Heโs less concerned with the joke, more with its reception from some nebulous โwokeโ group. Those people are soft, weak-willed, easily affronted, he keeps insisting. These proclamations serve to turn Gervais from a thoughtful, clever (and obnoxious) observer of the human conditionโstuff heโs been capable ofโinto a common troll, a windup merchant, a shithouser. And the material suffers for it.
It’s such a banal premise to base your comedic identity around. Like many of his peers, Gervais frames this, maliciously, as a free speech issue. That there are things you can no longer say or do, things that were completely acceptable โback in the dayโ. And while that may be true to an extentโas we speak, thereโs a petition urging Netflix to take down a section on Armageddon where Gervais uses the R-word, an ableist slur, for disabled childrenโthe reasons behind it are often just a natural evolution of language and culture, the shifting shape of contemporary morality. Eliminating dehumanising slurs from everyday language does not have to constitute a free speech crisis.
Heโs against puritanism in art, and he may have a point thereโit can all get a bit much. But he doesnโt interrogate the subject with any real substance. He teases a grown-up examination around the politics of languageโabout the circular nature of itโbut doesnโt follow through, resorting instead to name-calling and framing it as little more than hypersensitivity.
Gervais wants it both ways: he wants to say the bad thing, and he also wants the validation and approval of the people for saying it. Thatโs a tedious back-and-forth where, to borrow from Reddit parlance, ESHโeveryone sucks here. While there is always value in demanding your right to offend as a comedian, to push buttons, to poke and prod, it canโt be completely disconnected from consequence, from the mores of the real world. Wouldnโt it be far more interesting if he simply said what he wanted to, without circling back to the underlying idea of โoffensive humourโ smugly every time?
While there is always value in demanding your right to offend as a comedian, to push buttons, to poke and prod, it canโt be completely disconnected from consequence, from the mores of the real world.
Because Gervais does have the seeds of a theme worth exploring. He reiterates often that people canโt choose their humour, and comedy does not necessarily signal oneโs morality or righteousness. That we canโt control our thoughts. That a joke is very often just that: a joke. Itโs not real life; itโs a performance. And that what he says on stage isnโt a reflection of his real-life beliefs, just as Anthony Hopkins is not an actual cannibal. Rather, itโs what makes him laugh. The point of humour, he says with much merit, is โto laugh at bad shit to get us through itโ. (And so he makes jokes about illegal immigrants, disabled kids, babies in Africa, Chinese people, paedophilia, and so forth.)
The reason why this doesnโt quite work, though it has all the raw materials necessary, is that Gervaisโ engagement with these themes is coloured with resentment and bitterness at the changing tides. He goes from thoughtful conversation to these-kids-today diatribe far too easily. These ruminations on language and comedy would have more value if he pointed his gaze further inward, allowed his introspection to offer a meaningful layer of depth. Heโs trying to tell us what he finds funnyโwhy thatโs OK no matter how terribleโand the reasons it makes us laugh. As someone who was once at the cutting edge of awkward, grotesquely discomfiting comedy, Gervais might have some compelling things to say about humour and our changing relationship with it. But heโs not quite able to get to the heart of the puzzle, too busy playing โgotchaโ to dig any deeper. More than anything then, Armageddon represents a missed opportunity.
comments
comments for this post are closed