Naughty, transgressive thrills from Gervais the overgrown schoolboy
The world has altered beyond recognition in the past couple of years, but Ricky Gervais’s latest show, which first appeared in 2019, is essentially unchanged, with just one glancing reference to Covid and another to Boris Johnson. Perhaps that’s a relief for audiences – and, indeed, a packed-out Palladium crowd seemed perfectly happy. But it’s an odd choice for a set that still feels like a work-in-progress.
The title ostensibly refers to Gervais’s double mission of debunking the supernatural and celebrating nature. Why bother with angels or ghosts, he argues, when you’ve got the duck-billed platypus? There are good gags at the expense of those who believe they were significant figures in a past life; even if you do accept reincarnation, we can’t all have been queens and emperors.
But Gervais quickly slides off-topic and into a meandering combination of censor-baiting taboos and beige observational comedy. It’s hard to know what Netflix, which has already purchased the show, will do with it. Half is surely unusable (“That won’t make the special!” cries Gervais gleefully at regular intervals), but then do viewers want to see him in Michael Mcintyre mode, grumbling about embarrassing medical check-ups or his standoffish cat? As for the more spirited jokes, they’re part of his bullish defence against woke comedy and “safe spaces”. Gervais firmly believes that a stand-up shouldn’t be taken literally – his opening salvo that women aren’t funny is an example of irony, he protests – and that he has a right to talk about anyone; in fact, that’s respecting minorities. Jokes aren’t innately offensive, he adds, so much as individuals can be offended by them. But he’s not kowtowing to those individuals.
It’s a considered take on a hotbutton issue. However, his actual set is mainly picking incendiary subjects and seeing how far he can push them, like a naughty child, rather than building an especially clever or revealing joke structure.
He admits his lengthy lesbian fantasy, in which he is transformed into Vicky Gervais, doesn’t have a punchline, and says one gag about self-identification was left in to annoy people.
Lots of it elicits shocked laughter – there’s a definite thrill about its sheer transgression. Gervais also plays around with his own responsibility, quipping “That’s not me saying that” when spinning a provocative tale, or asking whether we can separate the art from the artist. Still, it’s a step down from his more personally revealing Humanity tour – which, he says, made him fall back in love with stand-up – and his elegiac sitcom After Life. But even a sub-par Gervais is naturally good company.