Here’s the most important news first: Ricky Gervais can still look like a puppy that just tore the carpet to shreds. A little guilty, a little triumphant at his daring, a little awaiting punishment, and then very sure he’ll get away with it this time too.
Most people know this look from the Golden Globes in Hollywood, where Gervais has hosted four times and shredded the stars in the room like no one before or since him. Behind every outrageous punchline, however, came this look, and let’s put it this way: his face has remained unpolished over the years, unlike Chris Rock’s at the Oscars, for example.
Maybe that’s really the comedian’s job in the succession of the court jester: to irritate the reigning king (aka discursive ruler) until he takes up his sword, but at the last second to incorporate a twist that doesn’t roll your own head after all leaves. The intensity of the laughter in the audience is fueled by this proximity to danger, to what is absolutely unspeakable and unspeakable in this kingdom. The trick is to somehow say it, but somehow not. Balancing on a very fine line, falling possible at any time.
Gervais has not shown anything of his art and his proximity to danger for a long time. His Netflix series Afterlife contained plenty of puppy looks in three seasons, but at the same time the assurance that here a really good person (played by Ricky Gervais) is only so beastly because he is grieving terribly for his dead wife. Good and beautiful. The strange need to watch a squat, knobbly-nosed elderly Englishman talk himself into obscurity and then look like a puppy was something this series couldn’t quite satisfy.
Mano man, the kings are irritated here to the blood!
The stand-up program is now available on Netflix Supernature, recorded on Gervais’ last tour. And man, when the danger is palpable, all conceivable kings will be irritated to the breaking point! One often hears comedians say that it is becoming increasingly difficult for them at the moment because more and more people are being fatally insulted more and more quickly. Gervais’ program is not only hilarious and often completely below the belt, but also a kind of analysis of this state of affairs, a discursive reflection on humor and a kind of declaration of war: who will continue in our present really If you want to be funny, you must (unfortunately, unfortunately; here a puppy look) not consider any sensitivities.
This last assertion alone is so fundamentally at odds with the zeitgeist conveyed by the media, who is the most powerful king of the present, that one catches one’s breath for a moment – and in the reactions to the show, the first swords have long since been drawn. One hears in particular about the trans activists, but they are perhaps just fixated, because measured against the list of provocations, other groups would have to follow: traditional feminists, believers of all denominations, Chinese, watchdogs against homophobia, advocates for people of short stature and people with disabilities , Boris Johnson friends, people in Africa, children with terminal diseases, people who are overweight… and so on.
In other words, the manifest program of non-consideration is simply carried out mercilessly, and if you think that comedy has to know its limits, you shouldn’t do this show. However, if it were only a matter of identifying taboos and then breaking them, in a mindless, mechanical dance of provocations, no one would have to pay any attention to the matter – then the biggest idiots would just be among themselves and would be begging, and the world would be unmoved turn on. It’s just a lot more complex with Ricky Gervais.
As an example, a passage from the beginning of the show that has already been cited and criticized for being transphobic. Gervais makes a distinction between “ancient women, those with wombs, those damn dinosaurs”. And the “new women we’re seeing more and more, those with beards and tails.” They are great. “I love her!” Of course, you can accuse a comedian of all sorts of secret motivations, but it’s important to remember that he’s just ostentatiously taken a position in which he loves trans women. All other women on the other hand, ahem…
And he then continues this game with the toilet controversy, which is now probably forever associated with the name of JK Rowling and which, in its embarrassment, he didn’t invent. In doing so, he adopts the language position of a trans activist. The fears of “traditional women” that “women with dicks” might use their toilets, and the fears of rape that have been expressed in this context, he satirizes and rejects with activist vehemence, blasting Rowling and allies (though without naming them ) even with the combat term “Terf” (trans-excluding radical feminism).
On the surface of things, trans women have gained a new ally in this passage, but anti-trans feminists have gained an enemy. To derive trans-hostility from this, you have to read them completely against their wording. And that’s perhaps what’s so interesting about Ricky Gervais’ provocations. His jokes tend to have pitfalls and double bottoms, they are occasionally constructed in a complex way and sometimes change direction in the middle of a sentence, and it is often simply impossible to pin him down to a position that he represents beyond his punch lines.
Is a joke a window into the comedian’s soul? Are you kidding me? Are you serious when you say that
And like all aspects of his work, he addresses this in the show itself, which is why it is not a festival for the dumb. “Is a joke a window into the true soul of a comedian?” he asks, and replies, “Well, not exactly!” Elsewhere he feels compelled to explain the nature of irony and inauthentic speech, and then immediately add what he “actually” thinks. But what then is just the run-up to the next punchline, even more tongue-in-cheek and inauthentic than the last one…
It would take days and weeks to unravel all the shifts and subtleties of this barely hour-long show, and its collective madness. Gervais shows a surprisingly cute (and real) baby photo of Adolf Hitler and confronts all the time machine fanatics who would love to kill Hitler as a baby with the real demands of this act. He then “confesses” to having lined a converted wine cellar at his mansion with this baby photo for the purpose of masturbation. And he develops a kind of “methadone program” to free potential child molesters from their “addiction”, the point of which one does not even want to hint at here…
Above all hangs the king’s sword, ready to beheaded at any moment. Does the Schandmaul finally go too far this time? But as this fool’s hour progresses, there’s a feeling that Ricky Gervais will get away with it this time too. And in the end that doesn’t just have to do with his cleverness – cleverness never saved anyone when in doubt. Although there is no reliable evidence for this, one feels that the man there on the stage – in the deep bottom of his puppy eyes, in the foundation of his soul – is not a bad person.
For example, his “partner Jane,” who appears in some of his stories, is real, and his claim that she has been with him for forty years can also be verified. The woman is a best-selling author, would she voluntarily stay with an absolute monster? Another clue is the “real stories” he tells of his youth in working-class poverty, which (just a feeling) actually feel real. The baddest jokes in it are not made by young Ricky himself, but by his mother and brother. And that makes you almost nostalgic for a time when there was still such nasty humor everywhere – as an expression of tenderness. Insane suspicion: does the man end up wanting to just hug us all with his punch lines?
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