'You not understanding my joke shouldn't be my problem': Dwarves, the disabled...and now God. Is nothing taboo for Ricky Gervais?
By SIMON LEWIS
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The ratings have fallen, the critics are turning against him. So why won’t Ricky Gervais back down?
'There's only so many nods and winks you can do to reassure people. I can't go round doing anodyne comedy and trying to become a national treasure. Nothing bores me more,' said Ricky Gervais
Has Ricky Gervais gone too far?
Has he shuffled so far along controversy’s ledge that he no longer knows how to get down? I’m a fan of his. Dare I tell him that the further he goes to offend, the less funny he is?
A little over ten years ago Gervais made the defining sitcom of the early 21st century, The Office.
Embarrassing boss David Brent’s mannerisms are still copied in offices and pubs, just as those of WC Fields and Leonard Rossiter were copied by previous generations.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime comedic bullseye worth £30 million to Gervais. Less well known but just as funny are the ad-libbed podcasts he made shortly afterwards, which have now been downloaded a record 360 million times and turned into an animated series.
Gervais followed The Office with Extras, wherein real celebrities played monstrous versions of themselves: Keith Chegwin as a homophobic racist, Ben Stiller as a bully.
After that came Life’s Too Short, much the same but with dwarf actor Warwick Davis playing a fame-hungry parody of himself. Some Gervais fans began to switch off at this point.
Then there was ‘Mong-gate’.
'I suppose I deal in taboo and excruciating social faux pas,' said Ricky
On his 2009 stand-up tour he would say each night of Susan Boyle, ‘When she first came on the telly, I went, “Is that a mong?”’
He argued that the meanings of words change and that ‘mong’ was no longer used to insult those with Down’s syndrome.
But when in 2011 he posted photos of himself on Twitter pulling what he called ‘monged up’ faces, he provoked a further storm of criticism from disability charities and fellow comics. He agreed to stop using the term, but the incident left a bad taste in the mouth. Where was the joke?
I arrive at his modest office above a shop in Hampstead. Gervais greets me warmly and ushers me to a ‘trick’ chair that tips over backwards, as he does with all interviewers.
The ice broken by the moment of slapstick, I get straight to the point, bringing up ‘Mong-gate’ and telling him that people who used to love his act are starting to get the impression he’s a mean person.
‘They might. But they’re wrong,’ he says, his wolfish grin unfaltering.
'There’s only so many nods and winks you can do to reassure people. I can’t go round doing anodyne comedy and trying to become a national treasure.
'Nothing bores me more. I don’t lose sleep over being popular; I lose sleep over knowing I did something wrong. And I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong.’
Not even using the word ‘mong’ to get a laugh? It sounded to some like the language of a playground bully.
‘The only thing I did wrong was not know that the word is still used to mean Down’s syndrome,’ Gervais says.
‘I never use it to mean that. But you can’t legislate for people not understanding. You not understanding my joke shouldn’t be my problem. It is, because I have to pat out fires.
'If I said I’m not going to answer these questions, I’d be within my rights, but you’d think I had something to hide.’
I don’t think he has anything to hide. But I do think he seeks controversy, and in this case he went too far and couldn’t really back it up. Why does he keep dealing with these touchy subjects?
'I don't come up with the most controversial thing I can think of,' said Ricky
‘I like dealing with original subjects,’ he says.
‘Taboo subjects, misunderstood subjects. I like to take the audience to places it hasn’t been before. I suppose I deal in taboo and excruciating social faux pas.
'The target is usually people’s discomfort or pretension or, I suppose, middle-class angst.
'You can talk about race without being racist. You can talk about disability without being discriminatory.
'I’m not saying that nothing’s offensive. Some things are. But I don’t come up with the most controversial thing I can think of. It’s churlish, it’s boring, it’s pointless and it’s too ****ing easy.’
Gervais is certainly right when he says there’s a tendency these days for people to complain on others’ behalf, claiming offence at things they haven’t seen. Many of his critics fall into this camp and deserve to be mocked. But if it’s so easy to offend, should he not perhaps try something else?
For whatever reason, his comedy has become almost entirely predicated on subjects like disability and religion, which are guaranteed to raise hackles. What’s he trying to prove?
‘I’m not trying to prove anything. It interests me. I do think a comedian’s job is to make people think as well as laugh. Everyone’s got their own “ism”. But just because you’re offended, it doesn’t mean you’re right.
'Some people are offended by mixed marriage. Some people are offended by equality. Do you know what I mean?’
This straw-man defence, equating his critics with reactionary bigots, isn’t uttered in anger. Gervais is enjoying the banter. But I think it gets to the nub of what he’s about.
Gervais has a degree in philosophy and is an outspoken atheist, ever eager to out-argue ‘evil Christians – the ones who say gay people are going to burn in hell’.
I think he sees himself in the mould of Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire and Rousseau, whose work he mentions during our talk.
He’s a progressive, applying a cattle prod to insufficiently enlightened parts of society. And if that sounds like a risky task for a comedian, wait until you hear about his latest project.
Derek, which piloted on Channel 4 in April and has been commissioned as a series for 2013, sees Gervais playing a care-home assistant with unspecified learning difficulties. It’s deliberately challenging.
But it isn’t, as many dreaded on seeing an early publicity still of a slack-jawed Gervais, Ricky ‘playing disabled’.
Ricky with Warwick Davis in Life's Too Short
‘I think people’s worries with Derek were, is it mocking?’ says Gervais.
‘That’s an important point if you’re playing a disabled person.
'But I hope once they watched it they saw it wasn’t mocking – and in fact, I would never consider Derek disabled. He’s not autistic. It’s nothing specific.’
I don’t doubt Gervais on this. He has employed more disabled people than any comparable writer-director. Extras starred an actress with cerebral palsy and an actor with Down’s syndrome in well-written roles.
If Derek was supposed to be disabled, Gervais would get a disabled person to play him. So what are we supposed to make of Derek’s unusual facial expression? In the light of Gervais’s ‘monged up’ Twitter photos, surely it’s a red rag to almost everybody?
‘Well, I knew some people would misunderstand. Either genuinely or wilfully. But that mustn’t stop you doing something.’
So why do it?
‘Because I wanted him to be an outsider,’ Gervais says.
‘In the narrative, I wanted people to make assumptions. They say things like, “Is he supposed to be working here?” I do think you have to put challenges in for people, because you come out feeling better. It’s like going to the gym. You don’t look forward to it, but it’s good for you.’
That’s not going to make a very good line for the poster. And that’s the problem with Derek: the pilot was by no means cruel or mocking, but with the comedy mostly consisting of Gervais sitting on a custard pudding and falling into a fish pond, it wasn’t massively funny.
He says it’s intended more as a drama than as a comedy, inspired by his fascination with marginal people like trainspotters, autograph-hunters and the people in old folk’s homes.
‘I wanted to put every outsider group together,’ he says.
‘A sitcom should be about a family really. And I think old people are forgotten. We don’t take care of them. I wish I’d sat down properly to talk with my nan about her life. I just didn’t. And now it’s too late.’
Ricky playing a care-home assistant in Derek. 'Derek is sort of me as a little kid, before I knew the pressures and traumas of the world,' said Ricky
Gervais tells me about his mother, who died in 2000 and whose kind forbearance is written into all his female characters, from The Office’s Dawn onwards. Gervais’s male characters all act like kids. The women are the grown-ups.
'Mum always used to moan about stuff,’ he says, ‘but she’d do it. I remember once, she was about 65 and we had a neighbour who was 85.
'She was bedridden and my mum was the only person who’d go round every day, tidy up, clean, go shopping for her. I called my mum up one day. She’d been round there and she sighed and went, “She won’t die, Rick.” Ha! Like she’s thinking, this is getting silly now! But she kept doing it.’
Towards the end of the Derek pilot, one of the old ladies passes away, leading to a scene where Gervais sheds what look an awful lot like real tears.
‘That’s the difference between Derek and the other stuff I’ve done,’ he says. ‘It’s sincere. Derek is sort of me as a little kid, before I knew the pressures and traumas of the world. It’s the opposite to everything I’ve done.
'David Brent loved having a film crew making a docu-soap about him in The Office. Andy in Extras and Warwick in Life’s Too Short were desperate for celebrity. I wanted to return to normal people.’
Will it succeed? The pilot has won several awards, but it seems unlikely to have the impact of The Office or Extras. In discussing Derek, though, he has addressed my initial concern: is Ricky Gervais a mean person? He’s not.
Ricky on the cover of New Humanist. 'I believe that religion is totally man-made,' he said
But, like his kind mum with her ‘She won’t die, Rick’ quip, he’s got a streak of mischief a mile wide. And it may get him into deeper trouble yet. Because his next target is God.
A large proportion of Gervais’s Twitter timeline is taken up with angry tweets from U.S. Christians who despise his atheism.
Since these people have to follow Gervais (ie, request his updates) in order to be offended by what he’s tweeting, they’re fair game for a slap-down. But he riled a rather larger constituency by posing as Christ crucified on the cover of New Humanist magazine last year.
Religious sensitivity is a button he really likes to press.
What might his more extreme critics make of Afterlife – his TV pilot, not yet filmed, about an atheist who dies and meets an arrogant, wisecracking God (Gervais)?
‘There’s this weird thing about respecting people’s beliefs,’ he says.
‘There are people on Twitter who tell me I’m not allowed to say the world is 4.5 billion years old because I’m mocking the Bible.
'I respect their right to believe, but they don’t respect mine not to.
'I’d like to say to people, we don’t need these ridiculous rule books made up thousands of years ago by people who sacrificed animals and stoned you to death for being born with the wrong sexuality. It’s ludicrous.
'We’re educated now. So no, I don’t respect those people’s beliefs. I respect their right to hold them. But they don’t seem to respect mine.’
Gervais hopes that Afterlife will become a series. With a house in New York, he’ll be spending much of his time on the same soil as the people most likely to be offended by it, and their guns. You can’t say he lacks guts. But there’s something that’s bothering me.
When I ask him what he regrets, he says, ‘Not having said “Well done” to my mum and dad. It wasn’t until I was 16 that I realised everything had been on HP.’
He says his mum believed in God. Doesn’t he feel a small stab of guilt that people her age (she would have been 87 this year), people putting a pound from their pensions in the collection every Sunday in dwindling congregations, are going to hear there’s a comedian with £30 million who wants to make more money by mocking their beliefs – and think the world just got a little bit less kind?
Gervais looks genuinely concerned.
‘But should I pretend I believe in case I offend someone? I’m not smug that they’re wrong. But I believe that religion is totally man-made. I couldn’t be surer of anything.’
An assistant knocks at the door. Gervais has to get a car to his next meeting. I never did tell him what I was daring myself to: that I think he was funnier without the controversy. I’m glad I didn’t.
To him, this stuff is the fun.
‘I’m not a politician, I’m trying to make people laugh,’ he says as we part, beaming with pleasure at another enlightened exchange.
‘But I want them to laugh at things I find funny.
'I know I might come unstuck. I look at it in a quite Darwinian way: I’m going to do exactly what I want, and see if I survive.’
*It's a myth that Ricky managed Suede. He did send their demo tape to Nude Records, but was never an official manager
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