Ricky Gervais
3Arena, Dublin
★★☆☆☆
Mortality, Ricky Gervais says, is his most honest and confessional show to date. It suggests a step in a new direction, but this is a set that fits neatly into the comic’s growing catalogue of highly profitable, easily criticisable Netflix specials.
As his support act Sean McLoughlin acknowledges early in the night, if you’ve bought a ticket for the gig you’ve probably picked your side of the debate about the validity of shock humour.
Gervais ticks his edgy boxes, firing out one-liners about dead children, Islam, rape, paedophilia and suicide. After anything particularly severe he makes sure to leave space for guilty laughter, digging his toes in and spluttering convincingly, willing audience squirms into cackles.
Plenty of it is just stark imagery. No one has been more dogmatic about the merits of an offensive joke than Gervais over the past decade. Somewhere along the way he seems to have lost sight of the fact that a joke can both offend people and, separately, not be very funny.
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The misconception is that the soft lefties just can’t handle the intensity of these moments. A lot of Mortality is spent bemoaning the naysayers – virtue signalling snowflakes who, in Gervais’s words, are not brave thinkers for holding contemporary views but false moral products of where and when they come from. They spout a learned rhetoric, questioning nothing and desperate to appear as good people.
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It doesn’t seem to dawn on him, as he rattles off a list of moans attributed to this woke mafia, that he brought all of it up. None of the dissenters, of course, are in the room with us. In fact they very rarely, he admits, seem to even enter his digital space any more.
Gervais’s dismissiveness is the reason why many have been left feeling hurt and alienated by his comedy, which only ever seems to punch down. Punching up, he argues, is too easy in the current climate. And, besides, the more people criticise and try to tear him down, the less he cares what anyone thinks of him, right?
One of the plus points, and proof that perhaps he does care, is that Mortality moves away from Gervais’s rightly condemned transphobic material. It has self-deprecating moments, too, primarily around the loose thread of ageing that occasionally links the show to its title. Toeing the line between blowhard and butt of the joke was, traditionally, one of Gervais’s big strengths.
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It is a snappy set that fizzles out towards the end with a series of drawn-out anecdotes from his time hosting the Golden Globes, and an odd story about homophobic soccer chants aimed at Elton John when he owned Watford FC in the 1980s.
Before his encore Gervais shares a celebratory message of defiance with the audience. “We pushed back, and we won, so f**k them,” he says, declaring that comedy is for the working class and can’t be destroyed by two-faced, self-serving elites. Mischaracterisation of his audience aside, perhaps the next special won’t have to worry so much about fighting his invented fight.
