Gervais hits back in row over his trans jokes
RICKY Gervais has defended himself after his new Netflix special was branded ‘dangerous’ by an LGBT rights group and he was accused of transphobia.
The comedian, 60, opens his hourlong stand-up show SuperNature with a caveat that it is laced with ‘irony’ and he is ‘satirising attitudes’.
He jokes that ‘old-fashioned women... the ones with wombs’ are ‘f ****** dinosaurs’ compared with the ‘women that we’ve been seeing lately’ who have ‘beards and c**ks’. He adds: ‘The worst thing you can say today is “women don’t have penises”.’
Criticism came from LGBT rights groups including US-based Glaad, which claimed the hour-long show was ‘full of graphic,
‘I deal in taboo subjects’
dangerous, anti-trans rants masquerading as jokes’. robbie de Santos, of Stonewall, said Gervais had chosen to use ‘his global platform to make fun of trans people’.
Following SuperNature’s release on Tuesday, Gervais told the BBC’s The One Show that comedy is for ‘getting us over taboo subjects so they’re not scary any more’.
He added: ‘I deal in taboo subjects because I want to take the audience to a place it hasn’t been before, even for a split second. Most offence comes from when people mistake the subject of a joke with the actual target.’ Former Olympic athlete Sharron Davies was among those defending his act, tweeting: ‘Thank goodness for comedy.’ SuperNature, rated 18, comes with a content warning for ‘language, crude humour, discrimination’. Netflix declined to comment last night. In October, Netflix staff staged walkouts after US comedian Dave Chappelle made comments about transgender people on the steaming giant. Netflix said the show did ‘not translate into real-world harm’.