Shocking, yes, but Ricky’s new jokes are just not funny enough
Theatre Ricky Gervais New Theatre, Oxford ★★★★★
The sweet smell of super-success hovers around Ricky Gervais at the moment. There was a period, earlier in the decade, when it looked as though perhaps the glory days of Britain’s most successful comedian were behind him.
The Office – the gamechanging mockumentary that made his name – was becoming a distant memory (at least its UK incarnation). The critical approval surrounding him had started to dissipate with his TV projects Life’s Too Short and Derek.
But something remarkable has happened in the past year. His international comeback show Humanity felt smart, coherent and – in its resolve to broach what has become so pronounced of late, a culture of hyper censoriousness and offence-taking – necessary: it made some of us value his mischiefmaking company all over again.
Netflix snapped up the show (netting him a reported $20million). Via the streaming service again, he then consolidated his global fan-base and stunned the doubters with his bleak, haunting sitcom After Life; the grief afflicting his suicidal local journalist protagonist facilitated Gervais’s customary line in devil-may
care barbs but it ushered in deep feeling, too.
That new insightfulness has seemingly gone on the back-burner for his latest touring show. Admittedly we’re only at day one of Supernature
(he has just launched it in Oxford, with more dates coming over the year). But the evidence here suggests that while the 70-minute set is cut from the same cloth as Humanity in terms of ready provocation it’s more crudely stitched together.
Is this Gervais’s most shocking show so far? It’s open to that billing. Aids isn’t as scary a proposition as it used to be, he notes, owing to medical advances: “All diseases let you down eventually… at its peak, Aids was ---ing brilliant”. In accordance with the idea of the disease being divine punishment, he imagines God inventing Aids, which has its own personality (“Kill all homosexuals!” “Even lesbians?” “No, I like watching them”).
It’s impossible to laugh at yet invites laughter. Some succumb, others sit stony-faced. I felt unpersuaded (certainly unmoved to mirth). Implicit in the approach is the idea that the context is patently comic, the material knowingly callous (and spurious); perhaps the line between liberal piety and latent bigotry can be breached by an involuntary guffaw. It seems curiously pointless – or at least, just an attempt to score points in an ongoing debate about where the lines are, who gets to decide what can and can’t be said. But none of the various topics tallies with a current issue; they feel plucked off the shelf to give the audience a jolt. That’s taboo-testing but scarcely artistically boundary-pushing. There are throwaway quips about fat people, an anecdote about a hounded paedophile schoolteacher from his Reading childhood, stuff about cats and dogs (differences thereof), the aches and pains of ageing and futility of prolonging life into dotage, something about the very buff bloke at his Hampstead gym. There’s nothing particularly political nor is there anything especially personal. At this point in his career, shouldn’t he be almost peerless? As things stand, the show is less a firebomb hurled at the snowflakes as a minor divertissement. There’s room, obviously, for evolution, and it’s early days. But if this isn’t enough to knock him off his pedestal, it may yet cause a wobble.
Further tickets for Supernature go on sale today at 10am; livenation.co.uk/ artist/ricky-gervais-tickets. Tour info: rickygervais.com