Standup Comedy

[Accident Prone]

Ricky Gervais proclaiming himself to be an atheist like it's some massively rebellious thing in 2022 reminds of Donny Tourette smoking a cigarette on Never Mind The Buzzcocks.

What's that? Ricky Gervais is an atheist now?! An Atheist! A belief that you can legally hold in England!!

[wordsfromlee]

1 hour ago, SuperBacon said:

James Acaster buried him and his "edgy offensive" comedy in two minutes on Cold Lasagna.

 

[TheBurningRed]

1 hour ago, Devon Malcolm said:

This post is at least 16 times funnier than anything Ricky Gervais has ever done. Terrific work.

I’m surprised he made a post of that length and didn’t swear at any point during it. He’s growing. Next he’ll be using flowery language like his mate Russ. 

[Keith Houchen]

3 hours ago, Ironic Indie Lad said:

Just had a look at the twitter response to the Gervais content. Quite pathetic really.

I don't think I've seen a single person be genuinely offended. Seems to either be people pointing out that its predictable, tired, unfunny shite OR people going "thank u ricky this gives me hope that sanity will prevail" etc.

 

This is the thing with comedy like this. It isn’t so much laughing at a joke or a punchline, but relishing how an imaginary person is going to be upset by it. Haha the snowflakes won’t like that one!! Oooh the wokey cokeys are going to go online and slag you off now!! 
 

Gervais has always done this, invent a scenario and/or imaginary person so he can have a go at them. “The Gervais Position” I called it in the UKFF thesaurus thread. 

[SuperBacon]

2 hours ago, Accident Prone said:

Donny Tourette smoking a cigarette on Never Mind The Buzzcocks.

At least that was funny.

[Merzbow]

From Stew's recent shows, I put it on by chance and the last line floored me.

[d-d-d-dAz]

Rick Gervais’ jokes don’t offend me. It’s the lazy way he, and most comedians like him, get there that I find offensive.

If you can find a clever way in, you can joke about anything. 
 

But oftentimes these jokes ARE just cruel jibes, which the comedian thinks they can explain away at the top with a lazy disclaimer about irony. Every single time.

The first news article I read said; “In the show Gervais, a longtime controversialist, opens with a caveat that many of his jokes will be ironic, explaining: “That’s when I say something I don’t really mean, for comic effect, and you, as an audience, you laugh at the wrong thing because you know what the right thing is. It’s a way of satirising attitudes.””

Yeah, fuck off. You’re looking to take the money of ghoulish twats who do want to laugh at minorities, whilst trying to absolve yourself of any guilt or any chance you might be considered one of those people. It’s lazy and it’s shit and it can go away now.

It also really annoys me when people say ‘it’s just jokes’ or whatever. Comedians are right at the vanguard of popular culture and set the tone of what people on the street think is acceptable, funny and repeatable. Some people are still saying ‘booyakasha’ for fuck sake.

Awful.

[BomberPat]

there's a bit in Richard Herring's Hitler Moustache show where he shows a BNP flyer that says "IT'S JUST COMMON SENSE", and explains that "it's not racist, it's just common sense" was a line he wrote for Al Murray's Pub Landlord character. He then mentions going to a big Al Murray gig, and having the realisation that not everyone in that audience was laughing at the jokes in the spirit in which they're intended.

Gervais knows full well what he's doing, he's too intelligent and too experienced to think that his jokes exist in a vacuum, this conversation has been going on long before him, and comedians far better than him have had to reckon with it. 

Even most of us non-comedians have had to face up to it at some point - if there's six of you round the table and five of you understand that your racist joke is meant "ironically", but the sixth laughs at it without irony, you haven't told an ironic racist joke, you've told a racist joke that racists laugh at. 

My old science teacher used to challenge kids that he heard making offensive jokes, and pretend not to get the joke. He'd ask them to explain it to him, and they'd always get all embarrassed and struggle to get the answer out. Because, nine times out of ten, the punchline required the assumed knowledge of an offensive stereotype, so you couldn't explain the joke without having to say the offensive part out loud, suddenly removed from the protective barrier of irony. With most, if not all, of Gervais' transphobic jokes, the punchline requires the assumption that the audience don't respect or acknowledge a trans person's gender, so it's not "just a joke". 

[Dead Mike]

4 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

there's a bit in Richard Herring's Hitler Moustache show where he shows a BNP flyer that says "IT'S JUST COMMON SENSE", and explains that "it's not racist, it's just common sense" was a line he wrote for Al Murray's Pub Landlord character. He then mentions going to a big Al Murray gig, and having the realisation that not everyone in that audience was laughing at the jokes in the spirit in which they're intended 

It all comes down to intent, you can't be accidentally racist. If a percentage of the audience misinterpret or simply don't understand a joke it's not on the comic. 

 

[Factotum]

The thing is, you probably could do a funny and insightful bit about Self ID. I just think Gervais is so fucking obvious with what he says that it doesn't really...mean anything? Its throwaway. I know Stand up doesn't have to be meaningful, but if you're covering those type of topics, it should be.

Anyway, I find the twitter storms and multiple articles about this stuff to be self defeating. You're doing exactly what he wants. Its incredible free advertising for him. Its why Netflix sign him.

 

Edited May 25, 2022 by Factotum

[d-d-d-dAz]

16 minutes ago, Dead Mike said:

It all comes down to intent, you can't be accidentally racist. If a percentage of the audience misinterpret or simply don't understand a joke it's not on the comic. 

 

Depends on whether that comic wilfully ignores the way jokes are received to profit off of ghoulish twats.

I’d like to think anyone with a significant platform would be actively anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic - there shouldn’t be room for misinterpretation.

[BomberPat]

18 minutes ago, Dead Mike said:

It all comes down to intent, you can't be accidentally racist. If a percentage of the audience misinterpret or simply don't understand a joke it's not on the comic. 

 

I don't think that's entirely true - if you take racism, or any kind of offensive nature out of the equation, and as comic, you tell a joke, and the audience don't get it or understand it, there's a very strong argument to be made that it's on the comedian. The comedian's job is to make those people laugh, to communicate a point to elicit a reaction. Sometimes you get a bad audience, or an audience that's not right for the particular kind of comic, but generally, if you can't communicate your point clearly to get the desired response, that is a failing of the comedian.

Now, the Richard Herring point around racism in the Al Murray character is that there was an assumption that audiences would approach that character in the same spirit in which it was written - but many of them didn't, they saw The Pub Landlord as the everyman the character thought he was, not the pathetic joke he was intended as. Sometimes that's sort of unavoidable; you don't know who your audience necessarily is until you put your art out into the world, and what you think of as very obvious subtext often gets overlooked (see also: Republicans listening to Rage Against The Machine, or Fox News complaining that Star Trek has "gone woke"). But the issue then is one of how you engage with that after the fact.

If Ricky Gervais, as a seemingly mostly liberal-leaning person, is happy to see the likes of Paul Joseph Watson, or Matt Walsh, a self-described theocratic fascist, or Julia Hartley-Brewer, gleefully praising his work, then fair enough, but I'd think most people would start asking themselves if it was all worth it, or if they were maybe on the "right" side of this issue after all. That is, of course, unless he's just cynically exploiting all of this for financial gain and attempting to hide behind the veil of "irony" rather than show the courage of his convictions, but who'd do that?

Incidentally, I disagree that "you can't be accidentally racist" too, but that's a much bigger conversation.

 

EDIT:

Quote

I’d like to think anyone with a significant platform would be actively anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic - there shouldn’t be room for misinterpretation.

 

And this is the thing, really. Steve Albini did a thread a couple of years ago taking stock of his small role in fostering the "edgelord" culture (and actually has recently weighed in on Gervais specifically), and in that he said that a lot of the comedy and culture of the late '90s and early '00s came from fairly liberal right-on scenes that were still predominantly white, but white people that looked around them and saw that they had some black friends, some female bandmates, and figured that all of the battles had been won, so it was okay to joke around with ideas that had previously been beyond the pale. Racism, sexism, homophobia, all of that stuff was fair game to make jokes of, because it wasn't real any more, the way it used to be, and it's okay, because they weren't racist, they weren't sexist, they weren't homophobic...but sooner or later, an ironic racist is pretty indistinguishable from a real racist.

Edited May 25, 2022 by BomberPat

[Dead Mike]

1 minute ago, BomberPat said:

I don't think that's entirely true - if you take racism, or any kind of offensive nature out of the equation, and as comic, you tell a joke, and the audience don't get it or understand it, there's a very strong argument to be made that it's on the comedian.

Agreed but any comedian at the level of a Herring or Murray wouldn't keep a bit that repeatedly didn't work. When you're playing to large audiences there's always going to be people in there who aren't the desired crowd. Whether its friends/partners being brought along or simply people who have got the wrong end of the stick. Its just the nature of the beast and that small % increases pro rata as the rooms get bigger.

[BomberPat]

9 minutes ago, Dead Mike said:

Agreed but any comedian at the level of a Herring or Murray wouldn't keep a bit that repeatedly didn't work. 

For sure. But here, "didn't work" obviously means "doesn't get a laugh". But "didn't work" could, and should, also be interpreted to cover eventualities like, "lots of racists found my joke about racism funny" - when that happens you have two options, you either drop that joke, or you keep it in because you're comfortable enough taking money from racists, and having racists repeat your material as if it reinforces your position. Or, the ideal third option, you actively denounce those people. 

Gervais is trying to have his cake and eat it too - he's pandering to some absolute ghouls (self-described fascists, UKIPers, and the absolute dregs of the online right), with his transphobia, while hiding behind the excuse of "irony" so that he doesn't have to account for why such awful people see themselves and their opinions reflected in his work. There are deeper issues about the proliferation of transphobia among celebrity, media and publishing circles that otherwise see themselves as liberal and inclusive, but mostly it's an issue of Ricky Gervais either being happy with the praise of the worst people in the world, or his ideological cowardice.

He's also, and this equally important, not very funny. They're not good jokes.

Edited May 25, 2022 by BomberPat

[Dead Mike]

Just now, BomberPat said:

For sure. But here, "didn't work" obviously means "doesn't get a laugh". But "didn't work" could, and should, also be interpreted to cover eventualities like, "lots of racists found my joke about racism funny" - when that happens you have two options, you either drop that joke, or you keep it in because you're comfortable enough taking money from racists, and having racists repeat your material as if it reinforces your position. Or, the ideal third option, you actively denounce those people.

By 'didn't work' I meant 'didn't get the desired reaction'. If Herring/Murray or whoever choose to keep a joke that's been misinterpreted I'd lean towards thinking its because they know that everyone whose opinion they care about knows they're not a bigot. Rather than choosing to 'cash in' off racists.