You can’t keep complaining about the policing of expression without acknowledging victories, however far or under-emphasised. On the weekend in Los Angeles, Ricky Gervais was awarded a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.
After accepting the honour, he said how nice it was to be alongside people like Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby, and Fatty Arbuckle. There were no audible gasps from the assembled, just laughter.
Perhaps that was because of other positive data emerging. Cancellations among actors and artists are down. So too, uses of the words “white supremacist” and “racist” in America’s largest newspapers, notably The New York Times. DEI appears to be on a cocaine-and-transexual-prostitute bender (the new Black Panther is, well, white) and Greta Thunberg, presently on a mission to get tossed off a roof in Gaza (Hamas may be limited to makeshift scaffolding) has received none of the adulation she was pasted with in the late teens for her choreographed truancy.
If America carries on for a few more months like this, it’s possible we may never hear the names Joy Reid or Wahajat Ali Khan again.
Spoof-reality
With Stephen Merchant as his partner, Gervais created the most exquisite, niched comedy of the 21st century. The original The Office, first broadcast on the BBC in 2001 in which Gervais starred as the show’s protagonist David Brent, was spoof-reality set in a paper distribution business (‘Wernham Hogg’) on an industrial trading estate in Slough. It seized on all English misery, loathing, boredom, and disappointment in lightning-quick, nuanced, but no less cutting humour, leading to mortal embarrassment.
In The Office, Gervais ridiculed two features of modern life – celebrities (at the millennium, brain-damaging reality shows had supplanted authentic comedy writing) and the working environment, where we spend so much of our lives. Bankers and lawyers in the City would tell me that they too related to the show’s dynamics, despite being surrounded by glass and steel and Michelin-starred restaurants.
People who worked in charities or bookshops or retail said the same: we were watching comedy located in the most undesirable circumstances with the most painful attention because we were actually watching…ourselves.
Sleight of hand was Gervais’s gift, and the first involved the subliminal profiling of the show’s characters. There was Gareth Keenan, Brent’s bug-eyed assistant, played by MacKenzie Crook, who wore a mobile phone holster on his shoulder and once remarked that he was more progressive than his father – because he described homosexuals as “gays…not poofs”. Martin Freeman starred as Tim Canterbury, gentle but hopelessly lost as the most normal of Wernham Hogg’s employees. Chris Finch, played by Ralph Ineson, parodied laddish behaviour in his interactions with Brent with meticulous if unnerving relatability (‘sales…lager…birds’).
Keith Bishop, the obese, expressionless office accountant, was played by the late Ewen MacIntosh. During his performance appraisal in Brent’s office, Brent holds up Keith’s answers to him on a page: “under weaknesses”, Brent says to him exhaustedly, “you’ve put…eczema…is that…a weakness…?”
But race was Gervais’s other masterstroke.
Anti-racist
David Brent was the 2020’s white “anti-racist” – all the way back in 2001, which is to say he was as incoherent, ridiculous, pandering, and pointless as the contemporary iteration. Scenes Gervais crafted here capturing reality beggared belief: in one, staff including Gareth, Tim, and Dawn Tinsley – the company secretary and Tim’s work crush – are relaxing in the rec room at their lunch break and casually talking about relationships, Tim turns to Sheila, a mousey, painfully shy woman employed on the accounts desk, and asks her: “Sheila, what do you look for in a bloke?” Sheila, clearly uncomfortable in groups, shuffles: “I like blacks”, she squeaks, while sitting next to Oliver, the company’s black employee, who stares frozen into his sandwich.
The scene lasted less than a minute, but it dismissed the entire concept and practice of “social justice” as a slippery, artificial concept. Instinct was unassailable; for every copy sold of Robin D’Angelo’s lousy book, there were ten sexual tourism adventures planned and paid for by groups of middle-aged English and German women to places like Haiti or The Gambia.
The Office (UK) – I like blacks
“Social justice”
Sadly, creative forces in the West chose to go long on the very bad idea of “social justice”. While Gervais and Merchant continued shooting the lights out after The Office with Extras (2005), An Idiot Abroad (2010), Life’s Too Short (2012), and Derek (2012), UK and US comedy slipped into the social justice torture chamber, betrayed by multiple cancellations and the spectacle of audiences breaking into applause, not laughter (critical distinction).
Frankie Boyle, the Scottish comedian, notorious for his remarks on the glamour model Jordan’s disabled son Harvey (“I do worry that he’ll r*pe his mother”) was suddenly transformed into a transgender ally. Nish Kumar insulted white audiences for their families’ role in partition (happily, on one occasion, an audience threw bread rolls at him).
Into his David Brent, Gervais had loaded reflection as being as relevant then as it is now. Try to understand things you simply can’t, and your life will be even unhappier than it already is – pretend to be things you’re not, and everything will be shit. Gervais’s grasp of spoof-reality-life implied that relationships are by themselves mostly incomprehensible systems that cannot be adjusted, and if adjustments are tried – like social engineering and social justice – then things go wildly wrong, people get genuinely hurt, and hostility endures. Though removed from economics, this view translates to the scam of BLM’s finances just as it does to South Africa’s floundering economic performance under ANC management.
Never cancelled
Why was Gervais never cancelled, like his colleague Graham Linehan (Father Ted) or mercilessly stalked by the UK political and media and academic elite, like JK Rowling? Because he didn’t give an inch. The headwinds he faced were organised, generously financed and widespread, but he remained indefatigable, impervious to claims of “offence”, which he diagnosed aloud – quite rightly – as a personality defect.
Gervais’s resistance to the grievance agenda laying immovable foundations across his arts has helped protect the legacies of people who may well have been forgotten in the cancellation jamboree – such as Norm Macdonald or Gilbert Gottfried (look up The Aristocrats). Critics bemoan his unwillingness to join advocacy movements, revealing a suspicion of the madness of crowds, in which – to Douglas Murray’s book on the subject – people become the very thing they claim to hate.
It is commonly accepted that most artists, and especially comedians, are troubled souls, and it is within this turbulence that they locate appeals to impulse. If some of that crashing and wounding resulted in Gervais digging in for what he felt was righteous, just and necessary, and helped the world navigate through the darkness of regulatory and parasitic creep, then – wow – he is owed so much more than a Hollywood star.
[Image: By Raph_PH – GervaisPall230921 (12 of 17), CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110607147]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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