I Watched the New Ricky Gervais Stand-up Special So You Don’t Have To
Image courtesy of Netflix
Before coming onstage for his new Netflix special SuperNature, Ricky Gervais introduces himself as “a man who doesn’t really need to do this.” Boy is that true.
As Gervais mentions many times during the show, he is incredibly wealthy. He’s either doing another Netflix special for his ego or a new pool house or whatever it is rich people frivolously spend on. Gervais periodically chuckles to himself during SuperNature and says that Netflix has already paid for the hour, so he can do what he likes. He reportedly earned around $40 million dollars in a previous Netflix deal, so we can expect that he received a similar payday here. Grossly overcompensating an unfunny and irrelevant comedian makes sense considering Netflix’s blatant downward trajectory these days. If they’d saved their money on this garbage, maybe they wouldn’t have had to lay off 150 employees last week.
Instead of enjoying his existing wealth, though, Gervais feels the need to challenge us, because hyper-sensitive audiences haven’t seen someone push boundaries like this! Except for the other Netflix specials hosted by older comedians desperately attempting to stay relevant.
Gervais’ jokes throughout the special are hacky and lazy. He defends his transphobia (which he dives into right at the top), racism, ableism, and fatphobia by saying that a) he doesn’t mean any of it, he’s just trying to be funny, and b) he’s an equal opportunity offender. Gervais goes to great lengths to explain that first point multiple times, emphasizing that it’s just irony and that he’s putting on whatever persona will make the joke as funny as possible. He wants us to laugh at how wrong that perspective is, not the transphobic joke itself! His larger point, though, is all about laughing at people who would be offended by transphobic jokes, not transphobes themselves. Gervais also willfully ignores the fact that stand-up specials and pop culture in general shape our world views, establish norms, and affect people. In short: his words matter. His jokes about trans women using bathrooms contribute to existing transphobic rhetoric, which emboldens both individual action and policy making that hurts trans people. People who are denied gender affirming healthcare, attacked, and murdered simply for existing.