Ricky Gervais' latest performance, Armageddon, can be seen as a Netflix special edition. Perhaps the most popular and divisive stand-up comedian of our time was criticized a lot during the presentation of his previous cabaret, SuperNature, for his politically incorrect humor, and in fact, according to the customs of the abolitionist culture, he was demanded to be banned. Partly with success, since his new show didn't even receive advertising from the streaming service provider, but of course a lot of people still watched it.
Ricky Gervais, winner of two Emmys, seven BAFTAs and three Golden Globes, is one of the best comedians of our time. He created the English TV sitcom The Office, of which many foreign versions were made, for example with an American Steve Carrell in the lead role, which, like its predecessor, is one of the best in the history of the genre. In recent years, with the TV series Mögöttem az élt, he proved that he has something to say and joke about such complex and moderately funny topics as human mortality and grief. He was the host of the Golden Globes five times, and most recently, in 2020, he was the only one to keep the spirits up at the crisis-ridden gala. Namely, as a good comedian, he said this to Hollywood's crème de la crème:
I'm here for the last time, so I'd like to make a joke at your expense. But remember, these are just jokes. Soon we will all die and there will be no second part. If you win an award today, don't make a political speech. Don't educate the world about anything, you have no idea about real life, you went to school less than Greta Thunberg.
By the way, the opening monologue was quite long, but it was like this throughout, it also included, for example, that
would have been in memoriam this year, but the list of the dead was not diverse enough, mostly only white people were on it, maybe next year.
Photo: Facebook / Ricky Gervais
The 2022 SuperNature stirred up a big scandal, especially its slurs on transgender people on social media.
Gervais has also received death threats, and critics say Netflix is not following its own hate speech policy (when it was actually a joke). Armageddon was not even promoted by Netflix, perhaps fearing the usual outrage, perhaps because they guessed that good wine doesn't need a company, in any case, the show opened at the top of the ratings list (and SuperNature was also the most watched Netflix special of the year).
Based on the title Armageddon, we might expect Gervais to envision the end of the planet and humanity, but he actually talks about a lot of everything, in his own words: sex, death, pedophilia, race, religion, disability, freedom of speech, global warming, the Holocaust, and Elton John. The title promising the end of the world is apt in the sense that Gervais's main theme is still the woke, that is, the intolerance, hypocrisy, double standards, short-sightedness and excessive sensitivity of the Western left. Of course, there is no question that Gervais would try to position himself as a right-wing comedian, his harsh black humor and materialism would not help him in this anyway. As he says in Armageddon, he thinks it's really cute when a comedian and his audience wink at each other in the same expert camp (with this, I might add, he also touched on one of the childhood diseases of the contemporary, mostly left-wing stand-up scene). As you say about yourself,
he is also woke in the sense that he is aware of his own privileged position and tries to minimize inequalities and oppression, but he is not woke in the sense that he does not want to silence and disable those who openly express their honest opinions or talk about facts and truths that are uncomfortable for others .
The stupidity and pettiness of the cancel culture angers, or rather amuses, Gervais, who even now argues in favor of the fact that we cannot choose our thoughts and what we find funny. (In closing, for example, he talks about the fact that there is a website on which you can look up whether you should be afraid of content that offends the sensibilities of some people in various films, for example jokes aimed at overweight people in Schindler's List.) The fact that the black comedian, who breaks the taboos of our time, works excellently is not need more evidence for his work. And while the humor of Gervais, who was once decorated with awards, actually only got better over the years, Armageddon was already pulled down in its own way by the critics, who at this point can safely be said to have been driven by political blindness, so the antipathy shown by Gervais is very real.
The full article can be read in Magyar Nemzet
