While on my way home from work on Monday Afternoon, thanks to the train strike and then catching the B1 bus to the City and be trapped on the 607X bus and packed in like matches in a box of Redheads (in the middle of a pandemic), I had the displeasure of enduring the so-called comedy stylings of Ricky Gervais.
I can not say that I was offended by Ricky Gervais (though I suspect that that may have been his intent) but I will say that being stuck on the bus with a comedy routine of his coming over the tannoy, was still not a pleasant experience.
One of the curious things about post-post-modernism, is that not only do we have a meta-narrative but there is also commentary on that meta-narrative. This kind of thing is just inside the boundaries of what still constitutes a monologue but really, comedians like Ricky Gervais are running a one-sided discussion where the audience doesn't have the right of reply.
An oft repeated trope of this ilk of comedian is that they self-report that they want to challenge the audience. Now I don't really object to "challenging the audience" (whatever that's supposed to mean) because in principle, comedy and satire and narrative, all rely on setting up a series of expectations or narrative plot devices and then resolving them in some fashion. Chickens cross roads because there is a minor conflict between the protagonist and the environment; which is then resolved in an unjoke.
Setting -> Character -> Conflict -> Resolution
This is an ancient formula; which in the world of comedy, can be resolved through satire, vanity, parody, wordplay, and a bunch of other comedic devices. I am not above using any and/or all of them but that doesn't necessarily make me a comedian. What that makes me is a human who understands how stories work.
As an essayist and not a comedian, I know the value in selecting words and turns of phrases, in order to achieve specific ends. I know why and how sentences and paragraphs and even how jokes are constructed; so that a logical structure is finished. The point of making sure that you carefully select words, paragraphs, and sentences, might very be because you want to make weak puns and jokes that go by undetected. However, a comedian isn't an essayist, a comedian isn't a polemicist, and neither is a comedian a thought provoker (though that might be a by-product of the craft).
What a comedian is, is someone who employs comedian to entertain the audience. Whatever challenges, whatever information, whatever piece of persuasion, whatever whatever that isn't entertainment for the audience, isn't the prime objective of the comedian. There is a place for the job of someone to make an audience think about both sides of an issue and there is even a place for comedians to go to really dark places but Gervais seems to want to go straight to the point where the audience is either pro-this or anti-everything and if you as the audience even think anything different to I, then you must leave. There is an irony that for someone who is anti-religion, he ends up being evangelistically atheist to the point where he is just as cruel as his targets.
The problem with Ricky Gervais, is that I find him deeply unfunny. The statement that "if you do not like it you are free to leave", actually does nothing to address the material of the comedian. If you offend someone, you're probably less likely to entertain them and although Ricky Gervais isn't directly trying to offend me necessarily, he fails at his first job of being entertaining.
This is a problem which a lot of comedians seem to be suffering from at the moment. They seem to have forgotten that comedy is about being entertaining. Other comedians such as Michael McIntyre bores me to tears, John Cleese doesn't think that he needs to write jokes any more, Jimmy Carr wants to use vulgarity as a joke, Chris Rock thinks that yelling is a prime delivery method. Hannah Gadsby wants to tell the audience stories, which I am not sure count as comedy.
As I said, I am not a comedian; so the retort that "if you think that you can do a better job, then why don't you do it" doesn't really fly. If a plumber has come to my house and done a bad job and there's a leak coming from the ceiling, you can either get that same plumber to come back and do a better job or you employ someone else to do a better job. As a member of an audience, I obviously can not do a better job (unless I write my own comedy routine) but I can find some other comedian to do a better job for me.
I will readily admit that comedy is subjective and what I find funny will differ from what someone else finds funny. I will also readily admit that what I find funny often revolves around the surreal, the absurd, and the cleverness in wordplay. I find comedy programs like BBC Radio 4's "The News Quiz", "Just A Minute", and NPR's "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" to be generally the funniest thing in the week. They also require the comedians to work the hardest without having anything to help them, even though I am totally aware that there will be set pieces and a lot of polishing in the edit suite after everthing is in the can. It's perhaps telling that none of those comedians mentioned are regulars on any of those shows and I think that it is because of a lack of fluid comedic skill.
Ricky Gervais though is an interesting character. He wrote an starred in an unfunny comedy series which found its humour in his character being a terrible person and the amount of social squirming that followed on from that. That kind of thing is where the comedian acts as the lightning rod and you expect them to fail. The problem with this kind of comedy is that there will always be sections of the population who think that such a person, however terrible, is a hero and that they no longer act as a lightning rod but a spokesperson.
The actual piece in question had to do with Ricky Gervais making fun of people with cerebral palsy. There probably is a market for comedy making fun of the disabled but I do not know why it is supposed to be held up as the pinnacle of comedy. I'm not really objecting to how 'politically correct' it is, it just doesn't seem all that fair to someone on the receiving end. I think that if anything, what I am suffering from is an abundance of empathy, and rather than acting as a lightning rod in the character of Ricky Gervais being someone not to emulate, he appears more as a spokesperson for cruelty.
I will not judge you, you are allowed to like what you like and find something funny or not. For me, the most offensive thing about this as comedy, is that it is being passed off as comedy. Political correctness, cruelty and empathy aside, this just isn't particularly good writing. It might be delivered well but it doesn't demonstrate comedy which is entertaining. I imagine that the bus driver thought that this was amusing and good for him I suppose but I experienced an unfunny routine, against my will and I was not entertained at all.
0/10 - not a comedy program
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