Ricky Gervais’ Armageddon is one more example of a phenomenon there is probably not really a word for – someone who once did something astonishingly good (in Gervais’ case, two things: The Office and Extras, and I know a lot of people talk highly of After Life so I’ll give him that too though I cbf) (oh, also those Golden Globes monologues – also fairly spectacular) who has, unbelievably, outweighed those with a huge pile of turgid shit, like this Netflix special Armageddon.
In this show, he uses the trope of wondering how humanity will end, and meanders from that into various culs-de-sac where he tells the audience how comfortable or uncomfortable they are and laughs at himself overly frequently in his weaselly way.
Something Gervais does in his stand-up which I think doesn’t really have a name, although a word like ‘plagiarism’ comes close: everything in his standup shows how much he enjoys Stewart Lee, but also, how much his adaptation of Stewart Lee is a dumbing down/punching down version of Stewart Lee, hopefully because he’s clever or humble (seems unlikely) enough to not want to directly copy SL, but almost certainly because he is unable to be as smart as SL, and can’t channel his own self-hatred the way SL does his (or his character's). Gervais’ riff in Armageddon about the couple with AIDS whose baby has AIDS who discuss themselves being discussed in the show and then discuss how they themselves are fictional – very meta – sings from a certain AI-generated Stewart Lee style songbook, though Lee himself wouldn’t touch it. Mainly because it’s not actually funny.
The reason Gervais can’t admit he’s Stewart Lee-lite is actually pretty simple: Gervais got where he did by luck, and he knows it. He was a failed pop star, and then he accidentally happened to make a tv series with Stephen Merchant that was almost completely ignored but slowly gathered a following in a preposterous timeslot and almost despite itself ended a huge hit. He was brilliant in that show and I’m going to say that Extras might actually be a better show than The Office but that because it is approximately the same kind of humour albeit in a very different setting, it lacks the impact. The impact of The Office (not just through that shitful US version) changed comedy, including the comedy that sought to not be that kind of comedy.
None of this really has a lot to do with Ricky Gervais, stand-up comedian, except it’s still him, and looks and sounds like him, of course. This guy is a piece of work. He’s got the entire moral value of those US Republicans who curry favour with Trump thinking that they can benefit from Trump. Gervais thinks (or claims) he’s speaking truth to power and that he’s somehow contributing to society with a dose of reality. Perhaps Gervais’ reality is that fearing difference and anything ‘other’ is the way people really are, but all he’s actually saying to his audience is, if you fear the other, that’s entirely understandable – and perhaps even positive. He thinks he’s being nihilistic, I think, but actually, he’s just being a creepy, lazy prick. In one little routine towards the end he pretends he’s God creating humanity (I suppose Gervais as one of the world’s most famous atheists figures he can say anything in the voice of God because God doesn’t exist). ‘How many sexes are there?’ God’s wife asks God. ‘Two’ he says – to which the audience cheers.
That’s the kind of shit Gervais, and his fans are. They know the world is changing and they know (or at least Gervais tells them) that they are somewhat programmed, as privileged middle-aged people, to hate the fact that the world is changing, but-and the comedy stylings of Ricky Gervais allow them to out-and-out resent the change and boil it down to a few idiotic railings against ‘woke’ and ‘fear of words’.
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