Compare Terence Blacker’s article from today’s Independent with this interview on the Beeb website from News 24.
Is it acceptable to be offensive ironically because the intelligent viewer knows where the attitude is coming from? And is that what Gervais is doing in his stand up and his sitcoms? I’d be interested in any thoughts from the F-list.
I can’t access either report from here, bar the headlines, but i saw the episode of Extras where Gervais’ character kneed the dwarf character in the head. It wasn’t particularly funny, I found it mostly clumsy and lacking subtlety. However it was quite clear that it wasn’t the knee/dwarf collision that was meant to be funny but the reactions to it, including Gervais’ character, the press, his agent etc. The point of the scene was that, riled in part by somebody else’s misrepresentations, the dwarf attacked Gervais, who accidentally caught him in taking evasive action; Gervais immediately panicked and protested innocence, his agent rubbed his hands in glee at the publicity and this was then picked up by the press as ‘Thug comedian kicks dwarf in head’. The only people this is offensive towards are the press and agents, surely fair game?
Personally, I find Ricky Gervais himself about as funny as Conor Cruise O’Brien, and his comedy is in the same envelope vis-a-vis the hilarity stakes as the Haynes manual for a 1974 Triumph Dolomite.
But offensive? No. Much less than the likes of the sneery Jimmy Carr, the thick Justin Lee Collins, and the uncouth Russell Brand, all of whom are considerably more offensive than the Bernard Mannings and Jim Davidsons of this world, if only by dint of the way they sell the same reactionary club comic crap as Manning and co. to the chattering classes by way of dressing it as “radicalism”.
I thought the most revealing thing about Jimmy Carr was when he complained that Jim Davidson had stolen some of his jokes. As Stewart Lee pointed out you should be worried about the nature of your act when Jim steals your jokes.