Karl Puschmann is Culture and entertainment writer for the New Zealand Herald. His fascination lies in finding out what drives and inspires creative people.
I’m sorry to report the latest victim of the culture war is Ricky Gervais. It has consumed him. And it has ruined him.
In his new comedy special Armageddon, which is streaming now on Netflix, Gervais once again wades into the trenches gung-ho with all guns blazing. But his fire is erratic and his aim wild. He rallies against the disabled, trans folk, environmentalists, millennials, the obese, the starving, and, of course, the nebulous being known as the woke.
But his favourite targets are all those people he imagines are offended by his schoolyard jokes and aged topics. Throughout the special, he constantly bleats that he’s just telling jokes. And if you can’t take a joke, well, then you’re a f****** c***. Those are his F and C-bombs, not mine, so please, no letters to the editor if you’re the sort of f****** c*** who gets offended by such things.
How dusty and tired is his new material? He spends five minutes taking a dig at Greta Thunberg. Gervais’s gags are so old that his target of millennials has in reality grown up and been replaced as the annoying young group by Zoomers, who in turn have also grown up and been replaced by Generation Alpha.
Ricky Gervais once again wades into the trenches gung-ho with all guns blazing. But his fire is erratic and his aim wild. Photo / Netflix
Gervais considers himself a comedic provocateur, but his gags here are as shocking as a flat battery. He clearly fancies himself the saviour of shock joke comedy, but the humour in Armageddon is more dated than a Kardashian.
This stuff was all old when he wheeled it out in 2022 in his last Netflix comedy special, SuperNature. Back then, I wrote about it in this very column, saying, “What makes it pitiful is that he clearly still believes he’s being edgy or controversial by making jokes about trans people or disabled people or overweight people or woke people or trendy people.”
Sound familiar? Nothing much has changed in two years. Gervais is nothing if not consistent, I guess. He may spend a good portion of time during this special jeering at environmentalists, but he obviously believes in recycling material.
More than anything, Gervais now resembles the hypothetical drunk boomer uncle who traps you at the family Christmas and goes on a big ol’ rant about how wokeness is ruining the world with a big poo-eating grin on his face and the certainty in his mind that he’s the last bastion of simple common sense in a world gone politically mad.
Gervais is a funny guy, but Armageddon just isn’t. He’s in the enviable position of being able to say and do anything he wants on stage and get paid eye-watering sums for doing so. So it’s massively disappointing that this is what he chooses. Lowest common denominator jokes aimed at the intolerant, the uneducated and the foolish. Instead of challenging these thoughts and ideas, which would be hard, he instead reinforces the worst of humanity, which is easy, while donning the cloak of a crusader who’s come to set us free from the tyranny of being called out for being an a**hole.
It’s telling that nearly all of his jokes pit the collective “us” against “them” and squarely punch down.
There is a single moment of self-awareness in Armageddon when Gervais admits he’s just playing a part, seemingly explaining his comedy persona to the people in his audience who think he really does want babies in Africa to die of Aids. He claims the explanation is actually for the benefit of his critics, which generates a large roar of approval, but I think we’re all smart enough to understand the line between art and artist.
The only truly shocking thing about Armageddon is how unfunny it all is. The man who popularised cringe comedy with the original version of The Office is now unironically cringe-inducing.
As Bob Dylan noted nearly six decades ago, the times they are a-changin’. That pissed off a lot of oldies back then as well. The reality is that the times never stop a-changin’. For someone who believes in evolution, Gervais has not yet realised his whole schtick is on the edge of extinction.
