by You’ll know this is great satire when I’m dead,” announced Ricky Gervais, an increasingly freewheeling comic shocker, at the dawn of his new Netflix special, Armageddon.
It’s an irony: even by Gervais’s own estimation, the show isn’t an odd satire. In fact, it is almost an anti-satire, a list of unsayables that Gervais invites his audience to provide meaning for. The problem is that unlike “great satire” – which is provocative, moving and takes the abuses of the establishment to task – Gervais is caught in the web of political correctness.
Let’s play a game: find a quote from a serving Tory MP to support a view expressed by Gervais in Armageddon. “I wish there weren’t any homeless people,” says Gervais with a lazy laugh, “because they’re f***** awful.” “We cannot allow our streets to be taken over by rows of tents occupied by people,” tweeted Suella Braverman MP, in November, “living on the streets as a lifestyle choice.” “Now,” notes Gervais, “the word ‘queer’ can mean a straight man who wants attention,” and, on that theme, Tory MP Rachel MacLean made a post announcing a fellow trans politician to reinterpret “a man who wears a wig”. Gervais encounters an illegal immigrant, clinging to the bottom of a truck, on his way to “Gary Lineker’s house”, and Lee Anderson, the Conservative vice-chairman, wrote in March that “instead of lecturing, Mr Lineker should obey with the reading out. the football scores and chipped crisps”. I could go on.
Great satire requires an attempt to adhere to the prevailing orthodoxy, not reinforce it. Neither Gervais, nor his braying audience at The London Palladium, are interested in subverting the political establishment. “I’ll be awake from now on,” announced Gervais, at the start of his seventh special. But “wokeism” is hardly a dominant ideology: a 2022 YouGov poll said that of those who used the word “woke”, 73 percent did so inappropriately. Of those who understood the term, 62 percent said it did not apply to them, compared to 28 percent who said it did. In short, it is more subversive for be awake nor not to be.
Where Gervais has always been interesting – and one of the rare places where he challenges conservative conformity – is in matters of faith. His atheism is a constant theme throughout his positions and positions (especially After Life, which deals with grief in the absence of spiritual comfort). He previously co-hosted a podcast, Definitely Mental, along with Sam Harris, one of the so-called Four Horsemen of the “New Atheism”. But the confluence of emerging evangelicalism on the right and the inclusivity agenda of the Left means it’s a topic that has fallen out of fashion in comedy in recent years. Precisely, then, the kind of goal that Gervais is interested in. Armageddon (which is, after all, the Greek name for Tel Megiddo, a village in northern Israel) who might have to deal with religious fervor, Gervais plays it safe. His barbs, when they come, are reserved for those who deny that humans are apes. Hick’s anti-evolutionism is easier to engage in than truly militant dogma.
What is comedy, Gervais asks, as he closes the show. “Laughing at bad s*** to get us through,” he replies, and the audience greets this infamous late-day moral with hearty applause. But what is that “bad s***”? The biggest chunks of it Armageddon (a show that should be referred to the Advertising Standards Authority, given how little it deals with the end of the world) reserved for jokes about disabled people (because that’s taboo, right? ). Are other people’s disabilities “bad s***”?
In one extended riff on the fragility of the modern mind, Gervais finds a site that provides trigger warnings for difficult material and reads the entry for Schindler’s List on. The audience can see where he is going and sit with rapt attention. He goes through a list of insensitive questions asked about the film (“Are there fat jokes?” or “Are there ‘man in a dress’ jokes?”) before arriving at the one he thinks is most absurd: “Are there someone misgender?”
The joke is that people are so sensitive that they dare not look Schindler’s List on not checked for transphobic content. The thorough investigative journalist that I am, I went to this site – DoesTheDogDie.com – and found that question on the entry for Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust drama. It’s accompanied by one note that reads: “Doesn’t the other commenter realize that every movie and show on this site has the same title list, no matter what?” Far from offending the sensibilities of a few snowflakes easy, the query is just an identification form applied to all movies and TV shows in the database.
But the gag is easy, because Gervais knows that the British public and its elected politicians think there is an insurgent strand of mental illness among a generation of young people. That is the politically correct view. Gervais’ jokes, which make fun of illegal immigrants, the homeless, trans people and others, are the kinds of comments that, far from getting you fired, are likely to be vote-winners at the ballot box. Rather than being “great satire”, Armageddon it’s just another lazy piece of comedy that plays on the majority’s fear of minority voices.
