STANDING UP IN TORONTO AT LONG LAST
Performer hitting Massey Hall sees upside to decline: ‘The world crumbling has worked well in my favour’
Ricky Gervais is having a new Toronto experience when he plays a sold-out Massey Hall Friday through Sunday; although his native British crowd has seen stand-up comedy from the co-creator of The Office and Extras all the way back to 2003, Gervais’ Massey Hall gigs will be his first stand-up sets on Canadian soil.
The Star spoke to the 56-year-old writer, actor, director and podcasting pioneer on Thursday and discussed his new stand-up show — titled
Humanity — as well as life, fame, and his Canadian-born father. Here is a part of the interview (full version on thestar.com).
What stands out about this particular stand-up show for you?
I’m certainly enjoying this one a lot, and there’s loads of reasons why I’m enjoying it more, and one of those is because it is better . . . I think it’s a misconception that everyone’s first album is objectively their best. Usually their fifth is best.
But I think the important thing is the world changed more in the past seven years than any other seven years I can remember in my lifetime. We all know what we’re talking about, and I allude to it in the standup which you’ll see, where I say I’ve lived through the best 50 years of humanity with everything — it reached a peak of freedoms, tolerance, communication, medicine. And now it’s going the other way a little bit, and I sort of blame social media for breeding this ridiculous thing that popularity is more important than actually being right, and this ridiculous post-truth era where if you say a lie enough, enough people believe it and it becomes a “truth.” And I talk about “my opinion is worth as much as your opinion” has always been around, but now we’ve got “my opinion is worth as much as your fact,” which is blatantly not true.
And the other way it affects this is that part of my sort-of shtick is that I’ve used irony as a satirical tool and said the wrong thing to show the stupidity in that thought process; so I’d play the bigoted right-wing bore who gets everything wrong for comic effect, and you’d laugh at that attitude. But with everything that’s happened in the past year, I was slightly worried because I realized there are people who agree with that, and the irony would be lost in their round of applause.
But (the audience) get it more than ever now because they’ve known me for 15 years. So now I can still do all those things without ambiguity; everyone knows exactly what I’m doing, and they know when I’m flitting between saying the wrong things for comedic effect, and when I’m saying the right things for comedic effect. They see the sleight of hand, and it’s with their blessing. That’s the most important thing.
Just like with the second series of something, you know what actors you’re writing for and you hit the ground running and you don’t need to have all those set-ups, I think because people know me so well now, I can say even more outrageous things than I used to in a way . . . The world crumbling has worked really well in my favour. (Laughs.) The total breakdown of humanity and the rise of hate has really played into my hands.
You have Canadian roots via your father, and you’ve worked and lived in Toronto for months and gotten to know the city fairly intimately. When you compare Canadians to other citizens of the world, what differentiates us from the rest?
The cliché is absolutely true. The politeness mixed with friendliness; people come up in a really friendly way. I can’t even nail my demographic here. In certain places I can go, “yeah, (they know me from) the podcast,” or “it’s a kid, and he knows me from Night At The Museum or The
Muppets” . . . Robin Williams said it best: he said Canada is like having a really lovely apartment above a meth lab.
And so I’ve got to get a Canadian passport. I thought I couldn’t get one. I looked into it, but now someone told me I can get one because my dad was Canadian. Which would be useful, because nobody hates Canadians ... And I love the fact Canadians drink. I love that. You’re all British, really, aren’t you? I walk around here and I see England and Scotland all over the place.
Fame has been a focus of yours in various projects. When you see how fame has evolved — or regressed to the point where reality TV and things like Big Brother have enabled anyone to become famous just for being famous — do you think now we’re all just learning how empty a lot of fame really is?
I don’t know if they do, and I don’t know if they care. Because, when Big
Brother first started off it was fascinating. It was like a social experiment. But by year five, people would say, “If you walk out (of the house), walk out on a Friday, because then you’ll get the newspaper spreads on a Sunday and you can put the deposit on a house.” And this was another thing (2016 The Office spinoff movie)
Life On The Road was about — the 12 years off with (David) Brent, which was great, because the world had changed.
People live their life like an open wound to stay famous ... There is no difference now between fame and infamy, because people know they’re rewarded for bad behaviour too. And with things like Big Brother, it’s like an unwritten sort of contract between them and the program-makers; they say, “If you let me into Big Brother, I will run around, I will cause arguments, I will take my clothes off, I will have a fight.” “You promise? You’re in.”
You’ve been a fierce animal-rights advocates for decades now. What have you learned about the animal world that a much younger Ricky Gervais didn’t know?
That we are animals. We’re part of it. We’re not above it. We’re not keepers of the world. We are literally great apes. I do this in my show: it’s not metaphorical. We have delusions of grandeur, but we’re closer to chimpanzees than chimps are to gorillas . . . if we were to disappear, the world would go back to the way it was in about 1,000 years and no one would know the difference. If you lose bees, the earth’s a desert. That puts it in context. A bee is more important than us. But bees are s--t comedians, so come and see me. (Laughs)