After watching stand-up specials for years, one of the things that I have understood is that the version of the comedian that we are seeing on the stage or our screen isn’t actually how they are in real life; it’s an overexaggerated version of themselves that they are presenting before us for the sake of comedy. For example, in the movie AK vs AK, yes, that’s Anurag Kashyap and Anil Kapoor, using their actual names, spending Christmas trying not to kill each other. It’s meant to look like a documentary, but it’s a scripted film where they are playing heightened versions of themselves. Hence, when I critique the film, I’m not critiquing the actual Anurag or Anil, but their fictionalized variants. Similarly, while critiquing Ricky Gervais: Mortality, regardless of how many times the comedian says that this is him at his most honest, I am not talking about the real Gervais, because I will never know who that is, but the facet of himself that he has presented in this Netflix stand-up comedy special. So, before Ricky or his audience takes offense at anything I say, please, keep this disclaimer in mind. With that out of the way, let me start off the proceedings by saying that doomscrolling through Twitter and coming across some funny tweets would have been much more entertaining than this drivel.
Ricky Gervais spent the first 20 minutes of his nearly hour-long stand-up special on the reactions to his previous hour-long stand-up specials. And much like the work of every artist whose very existence is centered around how people tried to “cancel” them but they still persevered because, well, cancel culture isn’t real, it was really painful to sit through. I mean, what’s supposed to be funny about that? There are people who have done far worse than crack bad jokes—and I’m talking about actual murder—and have then been embraced by society and garlanded. So, am I supposed to be startled at the fact that a male comedian’s career is thriving in the face of online backlash? I know that Gervais can do better than this because I used to laugh at his jokes—yes, even the offensive ones—because, at the end of the day, they are just jokes. Now, it seems like he’s stuck in a rut, recycling stuff from the 2000s and 2010s, because his definition of edgy humor just hasn’t been updated. Dude, I have seen kids from countries that have been decimated to hell—allegedly with some help from the country that Gervais is so proud of hailing from—put out videos on social media with much more hard-hitting dark humor than whatever this bloke is releasing while getting paid in the millions.
Continuing on the topic of being out of touch, I don’t think it’s a surprise that the millions of dollars, pounds, or euros that Gervais has earned have divorced him from reality. Yes, he does claim that he is fighting the woke mind virus, which is apparently being spread by the elite classes, because the wealthy don’t want the working class to laugh. But, firstly, he belongs to the class that he’s fighting against, and secondly, none of his jokes integrate the working class’ lived reality. If Gervais’ set is made of jokes about how things have become too woke, and if the audience is laughing at how Gervais is fighting against this supposed woke tidal wave that’s taking away our ability to simply laugh at crude humor, I am sorry to burst the bubble, but both Gervais and his audience belong to the same elite circle that the working class love to laugh about. The working class doesn’t have the time to think about whether wokeness is the real problem because they are too busy making ends meet. Sure, I don’t belong to the working class either, because I am here sitting in my bedroom critiquing Gervais’ bland jokes, but at least I’m not pretending to be a crusader of comedic justice while imagining a scenario about verbally abusing the waitstaff of a restaurant who couldn’t afford a day off despite being sick.
You know what? It’s fine that Gervais doesn’t have his ear to the ground anymore and perceives reality through the elite bubbles that he walks through, the belligerent national media, or social media outlets whose algorithms are out to convince everyone that wokeness will be the death of mankind. When he brought up the Golden Globes stuff in Mortality, I thought that at least that’ll give us some interesting stories because, to be honest, most of us aren’t or never will be privy to what happens in award shows. Surprisingly enough, or maybe unsurprisingly enough, even that was incredibly uninteresting, since Gervais graduated from making crude jokes about imaginary people to making crude jokes about celebrities. And this might be the worst aspect of his jokes: for all of Gervais’ whining about the rise of self-censorship due to the fear of getting “cancelled,” his humor seemed really tame. I mean, he brought up my country several times, and it was the most inoffensive stuff that I have ever heard. The people of my own country say more edgy things, even though they can be jailed at any second, but Ricky Gervais, with all his free speech and millions of dollars, can’t do better than making a sexual assault joke about Gandhi and India drowning because of global warming? Come on, man! How does one expect to fight the woke mind virus if this is all that they can come up with?
I know that the show is called Mortality, and it seems like Gervais either forgot about writing anything substantial around that concept or maybe he just doesn’t have anything profound to say about the finiteness of life. I am not as old or as experienced as Gervais, but with age, I have started to empathize with things that I never used to empathize with, especially when it involves old people. When I was younger and I saw people doing the “old man yells at clouds” meme in real time, I used to laugh at them, because it didn’t occur to me that I’d reach that age one day. Now, I either agree with them or ignore them so that they think that their opinions are valid and they don’t feel mocked. I found myself applying that same approach to Gervais too, because his jokes have become so bad that laughing at them seems like I am partaking in a charity event to help this old man feel relevant. I might be enabling him by doing so, but given how we’re hurtling towards oblivion, does it really matter? So, yeah, if you see your local comedian spiraling out because of the fear of the woke mind virus, give them a pat on the back and tell them it’s all going to be okay.
