Ricky Gervais doesn’t diminish his humor for the woke crowd.
The comedian is once again stirring the cauldron online after claiming that ‘smart people’ aren’t offended by jokes about AIDS, Hitler and other taboo subjects. The 60-year-old British comedian dropped the PC bombshell while promoting his new Netflix special, “SuperNature,” on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”
“Smart people know you can handle anything, especially when it comes to something like irony,” the 58-year-old ‘The Office’ creator told Colbert.
During the interview, Gervais explained that he had added new material to the special, which he had tried before the coronavirus quarantine. Colbert then asked if the comedian had to change gear due to his two-year layoff from stand-up during the lockdown.
It was then that Gervais dropped the bomb. “This [his comedy] was always evolving,” the comedian replied. “There was a thought, ‘Will this be obsolete?’ And then I realized that when you’re dealing with, you know, famine, AIDS, cancer, Hitler, those guys are still in. Yeah, so they’re not going, they’re not dating.
Colbert seemed to agree with her sentiment, saying, “There’s no audience that won’t like that.”
“Boo! Not Hitler! That was a long time ago,” Gervais replied facetiously, prompting the host to respond with a laugh, “Like, you don’t go to a Ricky Gervais concert just to feel good.”
However, while the aforementioned topics are certainly sensitive for many, the ‘After Life’ star insisted that the audience “feels good” and that the ultimate goal “is to make them laugh.”
“They’re laughing, but they know I’m dealing with taboo subjects,” he explained in his impromptu lecture. “But I deal with taboo subjects because I want to take the audience to a place they’ve never been, and there’s a tension.”
He insisted that too often people are offended by mistaking a quip for the actual “target”, and that intelligent audiences know how to take things in their comedic context.
But he doesn’t just make offensive jokes for fun: Elsewhere in the interview, Gervais touted the healing power of dark humor, likening it to a vaccine against the harsh reality of existence.
“Humour allows us to overcome bad things,” said the Emmy winner. “That’s why I laugh at bad, terrifying things. You know, that’s why comedians are obsessed with death because, you know, it gets us through. . . it’s an inoculation to the real things that are going to happen.
And Gervais seems to put his funny where his mouth is. In the past, “Derek’s” mastermind has used his rhetorical torch on a variety of supposedly taboo topics, from the Holocaust to pedophilia.
More recently, the five-time Golden Globe Awards host controversially mocked Will Smith slapping Chris Rock for crushing on Jada Pinkett Smith at the 2022 Oscars. In a viral Twitter thread, Gervais claimed he wouldn’t mocked Smith’s hair loss like Rock did – but reportedly took aim at his open relationship instead.
Gervais joked that his ultimate goal was to get canceled by the public.
“One thing I’ve definitely decided to do, and I can’t wait to get started, is my new stand-up show,” the Briton told Heat magazine while promoting his upcoming ‘Armageddon’ show. .
Gervais added: “I treat it like it’s my last. It won’t, but I want to put it all in. I want to try to be canceled. No, I just want to do everything there.
“SuperNature” hits Netflix on May 24.