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July 12, 2019 - Making Sense - Sam Harris
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#163 — Ricky Gervais

Sam Harris speaks with Ricky Gervais. They discuss fame, the effect of social media, the changing state of comedy, offensive jokes, Louis CK, political hypocrisy, Brexit and Trump, the state of journalism, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.
This is Sam Harris.
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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.
This is Sam Harris.
Okay.
Brief housekeeping.
The Waking Up Course The Groups feature is finally launching, I believe, in the next update, so more or less any day now.
And this will give you the ability to schedule a time to practice with friends and colleagues and even strangers.
You can just go out to people in your world and then meet in a virtual group where you can sit in silence or listen to a guided session or both.
I'm actually excited about this.
It will obviously create social support for people and accountability, but I think it'll just be very cool to see your friends practicing with you in silence.
I'm hoping that it'll simulate the intimacy one experiences on retreat.
It's amazingly intimate just to sit with people in silence.
So hopefully that proves valuable to everyone.
Needless to say, if you discover bugs, please let us know at support at wakingup.com.
And if you're not using the app and you want more information, you can find all of it at that website.
The app launched now nine months ago, and the feedback has really been great.
It is very gratifying to know that so many of you are finding it useful.
But it's still very much a work in progress, and it will be absorbing much more of my energy over the next year or so.
So stay tuned for changes and more content.
OK.
Well, in this episode of the podcast, I speak with Ricky Gervais.
You surely know Ricky from The Office and Extras and many of his other shows, most recently Afterlife on Netflix.
You can also see his great hour of stand-up there, titled Humanity.
And he has another one in the works called Supernature.
This conversation was a long time coming.
I've been emailing with him for years at this point, but we had never met.
So I took the opportunity to fly to London.
I thought this was one that had to be done in person.
Anyway, it was great to finally meet Ricky, and we talk about many things.
We talk about comedy, obviously, and fame, the effect of social media.
We talk about the risk of telling offensive jokes, or saying much of anything, really.
We talk about Louis C.K.
and Brexit and Trump, political hypocrisy, the state of journalism.
We touch many things here.
As always, if you find conversations like these valuable, you can support the podcast by becoming a subscriber through my website at samharris.org.
And I left the bonus questions in this episode, but once my website is revamped, which is also happening very soon, we'll be rolling out the bonus questions I've acquired for other guests to subscribers.
So those, along with Ask Me Anything episodes of the podcast, and some other content that will soon be coming, is there to incentivize subscription.
Because while the podcast itself is free, subscriber support is what makes it possible.
And now, without further delay, I bring you Ricky Gervais.
Do you want to make sure that's recording?
Yeah, no, it is recording, but I just want to make sure the level is right.
So yeah, I think we should keep this as close to you as you need to be.
But yeah, I don't want you to put your back out for this interview, so you should be uncomfortable.
Okay, why don't I do that?
I'll get you comfortable.
I will move the mic to get you comfortable.
What kind of chair is that?
It's a novelty chair.
It's from Graham Norton.
Right.
Is that too much?
I have no mic technique at all.
Well, you have this mic.
Well, you are a podcaster, so you should have some mic technique.
No.
Yeah, you can get right up on it.
But you have that big laugh.
Sound man all over the world.
So I'm going to ask you to leave the room if you have to do that again.
A big laugh.
That's a lovely euphemism for annoying noise.
He has a big laugh.
It's a great laugh.
You know who has the biggest laugh?
Have you ever heard Jeff Bezos laugh?
No.
He has the most cartoonish billionaire's laugh.
It's like a rifle shot.
I imagine it might be sort of...
A linear relationship of wealth to health.
Funny everything is.
It gets louder and louder.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
So.
Right.
There we go.
I'm going to get you now.
Two idiots setting up to try and sound intelligent.
I am here with Ricky Gervais.
Ricky, thanks for coming on the podcast.
My pleasure.
I've traveled a quarter of a mile for this in my office, very near my house in Hampstead.
You've flown 3,000 miles.
So guess which one of us is jet lagged?
That's good.
I have the advantage.
It's an honor.
For me too.
It's been some years that I've wanted to just meet you.
I just noticed that it wasn't happening by accident, though we were exchanging emails.
So I just wanted to make it happen.
The day has come and it's a thrill.
I'm a bit nervous.
You were a professional comedian and a world famous star.
I'm scared that us two in a room will egg each other on and we'll say things that will be... You can't have a subtle argument anymore, is my point.
There's no place for nuance or...
Or everything has to be binary for the right people to agree and disagree.
And there's no context anymore.
No one cares about context anymore.
They'll take anything out because it's all about point scoring.
So that's why when we're discussing contentious or having a discussion seems dangerous.
In the modern world.
Well, I want to talk about that.
Before we jump into that, I just want to ask you a few questions about just how you got into this position.
At what point did you become famous, and how long were you working in comedy before you had to think about the world paying attention to what you were doing?
Well, I guess it's sort of an accident.
A very slow, gradual process.
And by the time I decided to be a professional comedian, I sort of nearly was one.
Because The Office came first, right?
Well, I actually started stand-up before The Office went out.
And I think my first Edinburgh show was while The Office, the first series, was going out on TV.
So I certainly started right in The Office before I started doing stand-up to any degree.
But they're about the same.
I think it was it was still relatively late, you know.
OK, briefly, I was a failed sort of musician, early 20s.
I then eventually got a job, just a job in my 20s.
And I worked in an office for like nine years, I think, which is what the office is sort of based on.
You know, I wasn't taking notes.
I wasn't thinking one day I'll be a comedian and I'll write about this.
I was thinking this job's near my house.
It pays the rent and I've got friends and it's, it's fun, you know?
And then, uh, because I worked as part of, it was the admin center for the university.
I helped a local radio station get its license by letting them promote to the students.
And out of the blue, because I got on with them, it was a tiny little station that just got its license called XFM.
They rewarded me with a job.
And again, it was still an admin.
I was the head of speech and they wanted me to, you know, write little news things and help out in the office.
Just, it was, it was a gift of a job, right?
And I was meant to write things for the DJs, you know, what was on that night or bits of the news.
And because I'm lazy, I thought, I thought, do I have to type this out?
Can't I just go on and say it myself?
It'd be quicker.
And I went, yeah, go on.
And I went on and I was funny.
I was just myself and I was sort of funny, but a normal guy being funny.
Never, never thought that this would be my job.
And soon I was popping up on three or four different radio shows throughout the day.
And it was just a day job with a little bonus, you know.
And I think from that, someone was listening, they were starting a new show on Channel 4.
This is 1997.
And it was called The 11 O'Clock Show.
So it was sort of like a cutting-edge, no-holds-barred sort of Saturday Night Live for new comedians and pretty much anything you'd say what you want.
And I went on there a couple of times.
And I suppose that was when I thought, oh, this is good.
This pays better than a real job.
It's less work.
It's fun.
But still, I was thinking, oh, this is not going to last.
I'm just doing this.
And then I thought, no, I'm old enough now to do this full time.
And I'd already started.
I already had David Brent, along with lots of other things that I was doing.
Again, it seemed like I was an amateur.
Comedian all my life.
So you had David Brent as a character before The Office?
Yeah, and he wasn't called that.
It wasn't until, you know, he started thinking about it and he's got to have a name.
And then there was this sort of nice synchronicity that I was earning enough and didn't have a day job to sort of Right the office and and it still didn't go out for another two or three years.
I went out in July 2001.
And then I also got my own show from the Channel 4 thing as a as a little spinoff called Meet Ricky Gervais.
You know, again, it was getting like a million people.
But I knew I had the office and I knew the office was sort of more important.
And I thought this is what I want to kick the door down with.
So what year did the office air?
2001, July the 9th.
930 BBC 2.
So when did fame kick in?
When did you suddenly... Well that was certainly, I'd have to say that I would be getting recognized on the streets and see things about me in the news and my picture around.
Immediately the first season of The Office?
Yeah but still, but to most people I came from nowhere because all the other stuff was small.
I had that I had a bit of a cult following from the 11 o'clock show and, but you know, we're still talking a couple of million people watching that.
And indeed the first series, The Office, I think only got like 1 or 2 million people.
Then it repeated and it became a cult and then it was like 4 million.
The first episode of the second season got started at five million.
So it grew sort of gradually and quickly.
But yeah, that was certainly when I thought, oh, okay, I'm a professional comedian now with a bit of profile.
And it was creepy at first.
In fact, I feared fame before it happened, because I was sort of older and wiser.
I was like, you're in your 40s, right?
Yeah.
Well, 38, 39 starting.
And then after the first year of the office, I think I hit 40.
It would have been, yeah, it would have been, yeah, July 2001.
I was, I was just 40.
And, uh, it's cause I, lots of things, I, you know, I, I, I didn't want to people to think that I'd, I didn't want to be lumped in with those people that just wanted to be famous.
So I wanted to be clear that this was an upshot of fame.
If you become a, if you become a successful Comedian or actor, you're probably a bit of a famous one, just because, you know, and, uh, I never signed that, never signed that deal with the devil, you know, make me famous and you can go through my bin.
So I was quite militant about my privacy and probably too much now.
Now, now it's cool.
Now I don't care, you know?
And, uh, I also thought it was, it would be an injustice for people to tell lies about me.
Cause I thought my reputation was everything, you know?
And now I think, it's still important, but I realize that reputation is what strangers think of you, you know, and character is what your friends know you are.
And so I don't care anymore.
Now I hear things about me, I think, who cares?
No one cares.
No one cares.
Yeah, well, I mean, people certainly pretend to care.
They give a good semblance of caring.
Yeah, but then that's like, that's like, Really, if you take, you know, social media, not just social media, now, lazy journalism, the worst bit of clickbait for me is, so-and-so said a thing and people are furious.
No, no, they're not.
0.001% of people are furious.
The rest of us don't give a fuck.
And we wouldn't even know about it if you hadn't made it a headline and shown two tweets as an example.
You know, so that's the problem.
If you take what social media is saying, you might as well go and visit every public toilet wall in the world and get offended by what they've written.
Except there are now real world consequences to this kind of amplification.
Of course, well that's exactly what it is.
Twitter's become more and more of a cesspool and you just mustn't take it seriously.
You've got to treat it like it's virtual.
And I don't get a lot of stick really.
I see some people that It's like they're keeping back a mob with a flaming torch.
It seems to me that you have created a persona for yourself that inoculates you against the worst part of this.
First of all, comedians in general have a little more latitude than normal people.
A comic can get away with something that a politician could never imagine saying.
Traditionally, historically, but now it's like It's like it's worse to make a joke about a bad thing than to do the bad thing!
Yeah, so I want to talk about that, about whether comedy has become more dangerous, but I also want to
Notice that I do think you are, you're managing to fly above or below the radar in a way that I feel like other comics aren't, because you, I mean, I don't know if you understand the physics of it, but I feel like you are more bulletproof than most, partly because you don't appear to give a shit about any kind of backlash.
Well, that has to be The perception, I think, for a comic, because as soon as you start apologizing to the mob, you might as well give hecklers the stage, because that's all they are, they're hecklers, and you've got to be in charge.
And I think if I have achieved that, I've achieved it for lots of reasons that's happening under the water.
That is, I try and make my stuff bulletproof so I can defend it.
I don't go out there and go, I'm going to say what I want and offend who I want and I'll ruin the day and I'll undermine the moral fabric of society and I don't care.
I'm not like that at all.
When these jokes, these routines, Hit, you know, Netflix or BBC.
They've been tested on people around the world.
They've been honed.
But then there's been a sea change in people's attitudes.
Of course.
Are there any jokes that you once did and could have fully defended at the time but now wouldn't do?
Has anything fundamentally shifted for you?
Well, I think the big impossible feat through recent changes is you can make your jokes bulletproof for the time, but now you have to make them bulletproof for 10 years' time.
Just in case.
Or 10,000 years time.
Exactly, yeah.
John Wayne was cancelled 40 years after he died recently for not being woke enough in 1971.
Just how woke did you expect John Wayne to be?
Exactly, yeah.
Disappointed.
In an interview for Playboy magazine, no less.
People reading Playboy nowadays are going, this isn't Woken Up!
But you can't legislate against stupidity, you can't legislate against the future.
All you can hope is that people understand.
I talk about this in my new show, Supernature, about the cancel culture, that it's not enough to Apologize anymore and move on.
People want blood.
People want you ruined because it's a point scoring competition now.
So Kevin Hart did some shitty childish homophobic tweets 10 years ago about, oh my son's not gay, right?
At the time, he got a backlash.
He said, oh, sorry, I didn't mean it like that.
I was just being silly.
Really sorry.
Deleted them all.
Then he gets the job of his life, you know, last year, um, hosting the Oscars.
The tweets come back up, the mob on Twitter going, what about these tweets?
You're trying to get homophobe.
You're trying to do... Oscars committee go, oh, just apologize again, Kevin.
He goes, no, I can't keep apologizing.
I said, sorry, and I can't keep apologizing.
So he lost a job.
Now he's got a point really, because if there's no value, In saying sorry and changing and progressing and evolving, why bother?
He might as well just do those tweets again.
And it's really counterproductive.
Also, if the apology isn't sincere, I mean, that's the... Actually, I want to talk... Let's table that for a second.
I want to talk about what I...
I'm thinking about is kind of the physics of apology.
I mean, just how can people redeem themselves?
What should constitute an adequate apology?
Before we get there, I want to understand this issue of dredging the past in search of controversy, because this did almost happen to you recently.
It was more targeted at Louis C.K., but you had that interview show where you sat down with Lucy Kay and Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld.
Yeah.
And you guys use the n-word and you're discussing why it is that only two of you ever use the n-word and the other two of you never do, but you're using the n-word in the context of having this discussion.
Yeah.
And then this gets exported to social media and media in general in the most inflammatory framing.
I mean the thing that was In my view, totally exculpatory, and it was exculpatory at the time, and I don't remember you getting grief at the time for this, it was like 2011, was that you were explicitly referencing one of the most famous bits of comedy ever, is it Chris Rock's bit about N-Word?
You know, there are black people and then there are Ns, and it goes back and forth.
And me and Jerry were saying we never use that.
Right.
And Louis C.K.
does, and he and Chris were going back and forth about that, and Chris said that he was black.
But it was, the most important point is that at no point was there an indication that anyone there was a racist or would ever use this term to express racism.
Of course.
And the person who got the brunt of it, of course, was Chris Rock for allowing... Yeah, Uncle Tom, he helped midwife this atrocity.
That was the headline, and the rest of us were sort of like collateral damage, but he was the one that got the real hate.
Well, I mean, the thing that is... Well, and Louis.
And Louis, yeah.
Because of, obviously... They were trying to find other reasons to bury him.
Of course, exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I actually, I want to talk about that as well.
But you heard, you must have heard what happened to this guy, Jonathan Friedland at Netflix, the communications director at Netflix.
No, go on.
Okay, so he... I probably do, but... This is probably now a year old.
I mean, this, the story is...
Didn't get a lot of press, but it's so emblematic of what has gone wrong in this moment.
So I just want to kind of get your intuitions on it.
But the comic Tom Segura, who has a couple of Netflix specials, very funny guy who, in his latest special, used the word retard or retarded.
I do know about this, but I can't remember the details.
Okay, so he used this word.
And there was a lot of blowback.
I mean, Netflix got lots of grief from parents with kids with mental disabilities, and so they had this sort of emergency meeting of the top brass at Netflix.
So it's this Reed Hastings, the CEO, and the 10 people under him, and this guy Jonathan Friedland, Right.
who was their communications director, and he said, "Listen, we've all been blindsided by this.
"Who knew it was this bad?" But apparently the word retard is as bad as the N word, but he used the word, right?
He said, "It is as bad as this word for the black community." And we have not understood this yet.
So we have to, so he's using it in the spirit of saying, "This is how bad it is." He used the R word in full, or he used the N word in full.
He used the N word in full to illustrate how bad the R word is.
Again, it was in the service of saying, this is how woke we have to be.
This is how scrupulous we have to be.
We have to figure out how to navigate this such that we make amends and don't offend any more people, right?
But his uttering those magic syllables, again, in a context where not only was he not expressing racism, he was expressing the most energetic anti-racism, right?
He got fired.
They fired him because the magic syllables had been used in that context.
And I happened to find myself at dinner with him, just randomly at a dinner party, and had not heard the story.
So I'm hearing it directly from him and his wife in the, you know, maybe two months after he had been fired.
And it seemed to me they hadn't even absorbed what had happened to them, right?
So I'm asking him, I said, well, wait a minute, so did anyone in that room, you know, did Reed Hastings or anyone under him or even any of the millennials at Netflix who were calling for your head, did anyone think you're a racist?
And he said, oh no.
No, exactly.
No.
And, but he hadn't, it's like he hadn't even absorbed the implications of that.
It's like this, this was a human sacrifice to a taboo.
Of course.
And it seems to me that we have to pull back from this.
That's interesting as well.
And that, but then, but then again, there's something comforting in that because a lot of people, if that had happened to me, And I'd been fired and lost my livelihood.
I'd still want people to know that actually, I wasn't a racist.
That would still be the worst bit for me, for people to think I was a racist.
Oh yeah.
So I get, so that to me is like a little light at the end of the tunnel that, okay, I'm fired, I've lost my, but at least I'm not a racist.
And that's what people know, the power of it.
They know it's the worst thing to be and accuse someone of.
Yeah.
And that's the, do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
So that's the power people have when there's a, you know, a lynch mob out to get someone.
People do sacrifice good people because they can't get to the bad people.
But that's what's so perverse about this circumstance because what it's selecting for, politically especially, are the bad people who don't care about being called racist.
Because everyone that's being fired And publicly embarrassed about a misdemeanor and being called a Nazi.
There are real Nazis who are getting away with it.
Just waiting for the job.
Exactly.
Yeah.
This must be amazing for real racists, right?
To be out there and going, it's all right.
Everyone's a racist now.
This is a great smoke screen.
We've got people out there calling people who aren't Nazis, Nazis.
Which makes us look... They don't know the real Nazis from the people who said the wrong thing once, you know.
It's a happy accident.
I think.
And it plays into the hands of the genuinely bad people.
There are real racists and there are real Nazis and there are people who are oppressing, actually oppressing people and causing harm.
And then the people who joke about these things, who are the poster boys, they get the brunt of it.
It just makes the world slightly worse.
All right, I want to swing back into social media and controversy for a second, but I have another question about fame.
Have you gotten too famous for your own comfort?
If you could reel it back and be less famous or be differently famous, would you?
I mean, how much does fame complicate your life?
Well, sort of, but then that's like saying, I want to be able to turn it on and turn it off.
I like I like getting a seat in restaurants, you know, but I don't like people looking at me when I'm shopping for pants.
Well, that's, that's sort of tough.
So all I can do is demand, all I want is the same rights as anyone else.
That's all I want.
You know, the money sorts out the privilege, right?
Now I just want, but no, I think I, um, You don't I don't call it I don't I know I can I can I live in a place where I can walk around and I'm not bothered you know how how different is that.
From city to city are there cities like if you go to L.A.
or New York are you bothered more than I'm not bothered because.
I'm not bothered because I'm, I'm a 58 year old in a stable relationship who doesn't do drugs or gamble or break the law or go to, you know, I don't, I'm not an interesting, I'm not interesting.
But you must get the incessant demand for selfies and Yeah.
And that's nice.
I never, I never refuse.
And that's, it's always, that's nice, you know, because I hear stories of someone's or someone so-and-so, you know, a person who's genuinely likes your work and they think they know you and they have to pluck up a bit of courage to ask for a selfie.
And I see that nervous.
And, and, um, I also thank you very much.
My pleasure.
And, uh, that, that's not, that to me, isn't being bothered.
That's being a person.
That's being a human being, you know, if I wasn't famous and someone asked for help that it didn't take anything for I do it anyway, you know, have you got change?
Yeah, I have.
Yeah.
It's not like I you don't walk away going what a great person I am.
You know, so that's enough that that means It's no skin off my nose.
So you're in a restaurant eating with friends and people come up to the table and interrupt your dinner asking for a selfie.
Again, slightly annoying that they haven't read the situation right.
Again, but usually I'm really left alone in restaurants because they get it.
I could go to places and be bothered.
If I went to some sort of Loud, drunken bar at 11 o'clock, I'd be bothered.
If I go to a posh restaurant, I'm not bothered, because you sort of create your safe spaces.
We'll get onto that.
So, no, it doesn't really bother me.
There is a level of fame that's clearly paralyzing, or at least deranging of a normal life, where the people, like, you know, I guess it may correlate with some of the variables you just checked off as not having.
I mean, being You can't get out of the car because there's a hundred people waiting for you and you have to hide and wear beards.
I haven't got that because I haven't got that demographic.
You can't get out of the car because there's 100 people waiting for you.
And you have to hide and wear beards.
That's crazy.
I haven't got that because I haven't got that demographic.
That's a big difference.
Yeah.
I mean, I also haven't got that sort of...
I see comedians who they caught it.
They say horrible things and scummy things and they get scummy people and then they get annoyed when they're scummy people that they've pandered to act like scummy people.
Now, all my fans are, I like to think, are normal, but they're not crazy, because I haven't propagated that sort of environment, do you know what I mean?
I'm not on telly all the time.
If I go to a... I might play with 10,000 people, but I'm in the car before they're out of the door.
If I started stage diving, it'd probably get a little bit hairy, you know what I mean?
That would be hilarious.
Do it once, just for the image.
Exactly.
So as much as I sort of fear it, and I'm probably a little bit phobic about, and I joke about, you know, the general public, I treat, I ironically treat them as scum and say things like that.
And that's it.
But they get it, I don't mean it.
They know that I appreciate my fans more and more, actually, as I get older.
And that's what makes you bulletproof.
Well, that comes through.
But it's interesting that you have that layer of, I don't know if this is on some level, you know, the David Brent persona, or there's a few of your personas that you use comedically, where you're above everyone, and yet the joke's on you, right?
Yeah, right.
Well, that's the important point.
So traditionally, a comic is a court jester.
They're down in the mud with the people making fun of the king.
Carefully.
You don't want to get Off with his head.
And so we have to be low status.
Now, nowadays, people know what comedians like me earn.
Yeah, it's hard to be low status on a Gulfstream.
Exactly.
Right.
So what do I do?
I do it in two ways.
One, I invite them in, I let them look behind the curtain.
I go, what, you think it's brilliant being rich and famous all the time?
Well, look at this.
And you know, I say, it's not all.
Look how I embarrassed myself in front of the Queen, or the first time I took a private jet, they thought I was the cook.
So I let them in and go, I'm one of you, right?
I shouldn't, I know I shouldn't be here.
But I'm taking, it's like, I'm taking the piss.
And it's not all roses.
The other way I get low status, Is I talk about things where they're better off than me.
Genuinely.
I talk about being old and I'm going to die soon.
I'm fat.
I'm going bald.
I got, you know, right.
I've got distended testicles.
So I do that.
And, uh, and then, um, you know, you, you, you can sort of get away with more, you know, that they, they get it, they get the joke.
And, and I think that's preferable to lying.
I think that's preferable to me going out there and pretending.
to be on welfare or pretending to still care about this or that.
So I joke about being rich and I do it arrogantly so that hopefully they get the irony.
Right, right.
It's a great position to be in because you get all of the benefits of being honestly appreciative of your fans and you get all of the fun of playing that other layer of pseudo arrogance.
But also, there's a part of me that says, honestly, if I can do it, anyone can.
They know that I've probably worked hard.
And they know that I probably had something, but it is quite an inspirational story, really.
A fat working class kid from Reading who suddenly makes it at 39.
That's quite a good story.
It's not like I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth and I had privilege.
Do you know what I mean?
There's nothing to be jealous of with me.
They look at me up there in my bad jeans and fucking sweat stained black t-shirt drinking Fosters out of a can.
And they go, I don't want to be him.
I want his money, but I don't want to be him.
They can laugh about it.
Because we have to be the butt of the joke, really.
And with all that arrogance and with me playing the war story, I'm always the butt of the joke.
If you look into it, I'm being childish.
If I'm winning, I'm smugly being a child.
Is there an example of a comedian who has a fundamentally different geometry to their comedy who you would compare yourself to?
Well, there are comedians that don't go there with themselves.
They go out in a suit and they do puns, and they're good at what they do, but those jokes are as good to read.
You almost don't need them there.
So my stuff can't be stolen.
Yeah, you know, I mean, it's not it's not it's not syntax and semantics.
It's, it's attitude, right?
It's a mood.
It's a man as angry about the world as we are, you know, it's almost not about the lines.
It's there's a narrative, you know, and this is interesting.
You thought about persona, right?
Because that's the other thing that the problem some people don't get.
It is a persona.
It's a persona.
As much as David Brent, but it's just more subtle because I use it as my own name.
So I treat the audience with a lot of respect in that I want them to be smart enough to know when I'm saying something I mean, and when I'm saying something I don't mean.
And I almost explain that in my news show Supernatural.
I come up and I do a joke and I go, that's irony.
That's when I say something I don't really mean, and you as an audience, you laugh.
You're laughing at the wrong thing because you know what the right thing is.
Right.
And I explain it at the beginning.
You also have that bit in Humanity where you go through a list of jokes that you would never tell while telling the joke.
Of course.
And again, I've set them up.
I've warned them.
I've warned them.
I almost challenge them to be offended.
And of course they're not because they're ready for it.
And then people say, ah, but the problem with irony is some people don't get it.
And I go, yeah, that's true.
And I go, so Someone can be laughing for the wrong reasons.
And I go, yeah, yeah, I don't know what I can do about that.
Because if you water the irony down so much that it's not irony anymore, I might as well go out and say racism's wrong, isn't it?
And get a round of applause.
Well, that's great.
That's lovely.
But it's not, it's not funny.
So you want to sort of, to me, comedy is an intellectual pursuit.
And as soon as you start You know, pandering or wanting everyone to give you a round of applause because they agree with you, then you've lost something comedically.
And I think you've got to be a bit cleverer with it than just going out there and, and it's not my problem who's at the back.
You know, when you play the 10,000 people, there probably is a rapist and a Nazi.
What sort of door policy is that?
As you come in, have you ever raped anyone?
You're not coming.
It's like, I'm not responsible for the people at my gig.
I'm only responsible for what I say.
I'm not responsible for how they take it.
Do you know what I mean?
It's crazy.
And the intention behind what you say Should be what's most important.
I mean, what you're honestly attempting to communicate, if you, if you, if your speech somehow misfires, if you use the wrong word in the wrong context.
I mean, I think there was a, someone told me about this.
This may be closer.
This is, I think this is a British story, which this must be very well known to you.
And it's, I'm going to botch it because I'm from America, but wasn't there a comic who recently used the phrase, Coloured people.
In the US, saying coloured people puts you in the South in 1963.
I mean, you're just a straight-up racist.
But people of colour is the perfect phrase, right?
And to get that wrong is enough to have your auto-debay.
It's about intent, I think.
If you were going round saying, Coloured nowadays.
It's hard to believe you haven't heard that we've moved on, right?
It could be genuine.
Yeah, it could be a genuine mistake.
I remember when it was the polite thing to say.
And then when I say that people thought it was too harsh, saying black, you know, this is people with good intentions.
And, and of course, if things change, then it's a bit odd that you militantly stick to words that people have moved on from.
But it depends whether it's genuine or not.
I think it's all about intent.
It's all about context and intent.
Well, I mean, the reason why it should be about intent... I mean, it's not that you can't cause harm that you don't intend, and one should feel sorry about that, but the crucial bit is that the fact that you didn't intend it is the indicator that you're not the sort of person who will cause those harms in the future.
I mean, Well, in 10 years time, this podcast will have us two saying the C word.
Coloured.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, yeah.
There's already another C word too.
I have a list of C words now.
You can say cunt because you're in the UK.
Again, I try to explain to Americans that how it doesn't hold the same misogyny in England.
It's a term of affection.
Saying cunt to a woman would be a bit, I'd never say that because it's just, it just seems too, and I'm sexist for not saying cunt to a woman, but I try and stress that it's so far removed from female genitalia in context in England.
We call it, we say it to men for two reasons.
One, we hate them.
Two, they're our mate.
I was in Edinburgh once and two policemen walked past and they said, oh, Mr. Gervais, you're a funny cunt.
I said, thank you very much.
It's a term of endearment as well, you know, but there is no misogyny.
In fact, it's almost the other way that you don't use it.
So it's very, very complicated and nuanced.
And that's the problem with social media as well.
It doesn't know international boundaries.
So when I tweet from London, that's a different... That's for all time, in every culture, everywhere.
Yeah, of course.
And we have to be educated.
And I'm a fan of political correctness per se, that I don't say the wrong... I don't want to be taken the wrong way.
I don't want people to be offended.
I don't want people to think that...
He's a man of civility.
Civility, exactly, yeah.
Political correctness, like other things, has been mugged and changed, and now there's a new word for it.
It's woke and all that.
But yeah, if someone says, oh, we have a new term for that now, I go, good, yeah, fine.
Just let me know.
I didn't get the memo, but now I've got the memo.
I'd be a psychopath.
All right, well, I'm feeling that the tractor pull of controversy is irresistible, but I have one left-field question to ask you now, because I'm going to forget it if I don't do it.
In thinking about this interview, I stumbled upon an interview you did with Gary Shandling on YouTube, which was fascinatingly off-kilter.
I couldn't tell how much was being played consciously for comedy and how much was truly awkward.
I don't know what to say here because I've sort of, he, I don't, I don't think he was quite himself.
Really?
He was in a bad place?
Yeah.
And he talks about it after, there's a thing on YouTube where he talks about it.
He says he, he was trying to do a thing and it sort of went wrong.
What happened was he invited me to be on his, some sort of anniversary box set, a DVD extra behind, of Gary Shandling, of Larry Sanders, you know, as a fan. - Right. - And I said, "Oh, I'll do a thing with you as well." While I'm at it, I was gonna do my I did a thing where I was doing my three comedic heroes, which is him, Larry David and Christopher Guest.
And I did those three.
There's a conspiracy theory that goes around that after the Gary Shandling interview, I cancelled the series.
It was only three.
I said, you do that then.
Like, no, that's it.
People think that you do it as you go along.
You know, I cancelled the series.
I think it might have been the first one.
Oh, no, Larry, I did.
I did Larry David.
And then I didn't know that.
I mean, he had that whenever I didn't know him.
I met him once very briefly.
But social awkwardness was part of his comedy.
I know.
But off air, he told me that.
He was in therapy five days a week.
He had five different therapists.
When we got there, his crew couldn't find him.
He was sort of, he was, and then he came in and he says he thought he was recording for his thing at first.
There's a thing on YouTube where he talks about it.
Look it up.
I can't remember what it was, but he explains it all.
And it was still fun.
I left it all in, you know.
People think that it was a stitch-up.
I go, no, I edited it.
Right.
You know, I edited it.
I left it.
It's like, you know.
That's what I like on this podcast.
Occasionally, I get people attack me as though they've caught me saying something on this podcast.
Well, of course.
Like, I had a chance to take my foot out of my mouth.
Of course, I know.
We left it in.
And also, it didn't feel awkward.
It felt like two people, two idiots sparring.
Well, it felt, it was a weird, it felt like there were sort of comedic egos jockeying for status a little bit.
I said, I said at the beginning that he's my hero.
Yeah, well, yeah, but then, but then it was also, it was not clear that What he was playing for comedy and kind of faux status, or whether he actually didn't know who you were to the degree that most viewers would assume at that moment.
Yeah, but he was teasing me as well.
He was trying to get something going, even after the initial thing where he says he didn't realize.
I mean, then we had a It's funny to be, as an enormous fan of yours, to just have a document there, and I'm an enormous fan of his, to have a document there where the two of you are collaborating and to actually not know how to interpret what's going on.
It's funny to be, as an enormous fan of yours, to just have a document there, an enormous fan of his, to have a document there where the two of you are collaborating and to actually not know how to interpret what's going on.
I mean, it's kind of a weird sort of cognitively straining document.
Yeah, but it was like we were doing it because it was funny and interesting and we were winding each other up.
But then it seemed like there were moments where it could have been taken personally.
I love that awkward.
In fact, you know, I could have put in the bits where...
That we, where we stopped and we were sort of normal and nice to each other.
But where's the fun in that?
Anyway, people can look that up on YouTube.
He owned me and he hated me.
He didn't.
He invited me to be on his DVD, you know, and then, and then he, yeah, there's a great that you should find it.
It's speaking about it.
And, um, he says that he got the energy wrong and he was trying something else and, uh, and he put it, you know, and then he, um, he, and it's funny cause when I got back with it, The broadcaster went, oh my god, this is really great.
You should do a new intro saying, oh, he was weird.
And I was going, no, I'm not doing that.
No, I'm not doing that.
He had a bad day.
He had a bad day and, you know, but yeah, it's, it's odd what people hold up.
It's like this thing that owned.
Yeah.
See, so is it owned on Twitter?
Really?
Owned?
So, all right.
So we've put our toe in the water a bunch here, but let's just focus for a moment on what...
What social media is doing to us.
So you do seem to more or less just have a good time.
At least like the public face on social media.
You're very engaged.
No one's ever genuinely hurt my feelings on Twitter.
That would be impossible.
Right.
It's like the analogy I use is I'm walking down the street and there's a guy living in a bin covered in shit, right?
And he shouts at me, you cunt.
Am I going to get upset at that?
I'm going to keep walking, aren't I?
I'm not going to, I'm not going to, you know, I might take a picture.
So let's just walk through this somewhat systematically.
So you do respond to people occasionally.
Some, some.
I mean, the truth is I don't get that sort of, again, I don't know why, but I don't get it.
I think, Yeah, I have no idea why.
Sometimes I have to look for it.
Sometimes I search things to look for.
If I'm doing a new bit, I'll put in a couple of words and find a mad thing, you know, and I talk about that.
And someone once said, why do you only retreat the maddest examples of, you know, fundamentalist Christians?
And I go, because a sensible Christian is not funny.
Well, where's someone who just says, oh, I've got spirituality and, um, yeah, live and let live.
There's nothing funny about that.
Whereas someone that says, I hope you get raped by Satan.
That's funny.
That's why I choose that.
Comedy is an exaggeration.
It's not my job to be fair, to be fair.
It's like, is it funny?
Well, now, is there a problem though, when you retweet someone to whatever it is, I mean, what are you at 20 million or something?
Right.
So, Is there a problem?
Are you encouraging the Twitter mob to go after this person?
Well, I am a bit careful because you don't want that.
So, uh, I try and do it with good humor.
Now I hardly do it at all.
Was there any point at which you felt your engagement with social media was out of balance and just, and complicating your life and the, and you do course correct?
No, wasting time.
Cause it's fun.
It's interesting.
I can, you know, I can sit there and go through and, and I use it as a, I use it in many ways, right?
I think number one, I use it as a marketing tool.
13 million people who get an email.
That's a good... that's really good.
Yeah, and on that level it may just be...
Unavoidable.
I mean, when you have a new show and you need to put tickets on sale, it would be idiotic not to have a Twitter channel.
I don't spend anything on, my gigs are pure profit because I don't have to spend anything on advertising.
They sell out around the world.
So there's that, right?
Why would I not use that?
It'd be crazy for me to shut that down because there are a couple of idiots.
I use it as market research as well.
Because that's not a sample.
That's the world.
You know, if 100-200 is a good sample, then 13 million, pretty much as it is.
That's how it is.
They're still the echo chamber because they're presumably following me for a reason.
And, you know, I can't But it's very good for putting out jokes and finding the ambiguity because someone out there will go, do you mean this?
And you go, ah, I didn't know it was ambiguous.
That's good.
I'll change that.
And so it's good for joke writing.
It's good to reduce.
I like that restriction of characters to, you know, it's no good for nuance.
It's no good for So you've got to be manipulating that sample.
You've got to go, hold on.
So this person doesn't get it.
Does that mean there's something wrong with the joke?
Or does it mean they're an idiot?
Usually it means they're an idiot.
You know, you don't care about if 10,000 people are laughing, you don't care about one heckler.
It'd be madness to lose that joke.
And also it's a disservice.
Sometimes I've explained the joke to people and the people who got it are angry.
They go, don't fuck it.
We got it.
You know, and it's the same, when a comedian apologizes, I go, oh, fucking don't apologize!
That's, you know, so you can't please everyone, you shouldn't, you can't legislate against stupidity, and you shouldn't, you know?
Well, so you're, again, I'm trying to find the ways in which you are...
You seem to be uniquely immune to the pain here, because, you know, like many people... But what do you mean by I'm unique?
I don't know.
I'm not sure that's true.
Is it because I act like I am, or my responses, or I shouldn't be?
I've survived terrible controversies.
I'm defiant against... So yeah, it's just, so it's one, the public perception of you not getting as much blowback Because I'll tell you why it's not the public perception, that's the point.
If you're on Twitter, you think that there's a war going on.
If you go onto Twitter and you hit the right buttons, it's like you're watching Game of Thrones.
It's like the world is full of Nazis versus anti-Nazis.
It's TERFs versus trans activists.
You go out in the real world, it's not.
They don't exist.
It's like this 1% that's in your phone.
And that's the terrifying equality that someone living in a bin can do a tweet and the next tweet is Richard Dawkins.
And you go, oh look, they're the same.
They're not the fucking same.
One's a moron.
So that's the problem.
So when you go on to these things and it blows up like it's a... But you pick Richard Dawkins as a perfect example of somebody who has obviously complicated his life by his use of Twitter.
And there's certain tweets he has sent, which I think had you sent them, Yeah.
It wasn't merely that the joke was poorly crafted in his case, it's that he functions by a different physics of reputation management than you do.
Well, my name comes up a lot on Twitter when there's a controversy, right?
At a Politicians' Summit, and people defend and go, oh no, Ricky Gervais says these things.
Which is right, but I want to go, well, hold on, let's look at it.
There's lots of variables here.
One, I'm good at it.
I'm good at my job, right?
I've thought about this joke.
This isn't me going out and saying the wrong thing.
Two, you could say, well, that's not a joke.
I make jokes about those things, but that's not a joke about the thing.
That's someone advocating the thing.
And there's another big difference there.
Is it a joke, first of all?
Was it a bad joke?
That's another thing if you're if you're dealing with really contentious, the more emotive and contentious the issue is, the funnier the jokes gotta be.
Yeah, you know, you've got to go people.
Oh, I get it.
And again, I talked about this on humanity, that people often get offended by let's say a joke.
Let's talk about jokes, actual jokes, people saying things they don't really mean for a comic effect to elicit a laugh, right?
People get offended when they mistake The subject of a joke with the actual target.
So, but some people think that something shouldn't be joked about, which is clearly not true.
So, and they do that because they think, and there's lots of stages here.
They think that, so if it's a bad thing, if it's a joke.
Auschwitz.
Yeah, exactly.
What's the, what's the target of the joke?
Is it people being killed or?
Is it about a stupid misunderstanding, or is the Nazi... There's lots of ways this can be okay.
You can make jokes about race without being racist.
We don't have to get to, you know, is it a racist joke or not?
It can be just a joke about race, and everyone knows that you can make a joke about race without being racist.
It seems to me that there are comics, though, that have Completely changed their act in response to how thin-skinned everyone has become.
Again, you know, I sort of get it.
You know, you have those thoughts.
You think, oh, I'm dealing with irony.
And I used to play the right wing bigger and everyone got it.
But now, Right wing bigots are in charge.
So is it the right thing to do?
So I have to find a way where I can still make these sort of jokes and people get them.
And you know, so there's a, I do feel there's a responsibility to at least try to get the right target and hope people get it.
So I get that.
And sometimes, and then I get why people go, it's just not worth it.
No one understands me.
I'm getting shouted at and my friends don't get it either.
And I want to, I want to be in this club.
I get it.
I don't want to give up.
I don't want to give up.
I want people to understand it.
And I try.
If anyone else does it, I'll explain the joke.
I'm happy to explain the joke because I love the intellectual pursuit.
I love to say to someone, no, no, I'll give you an example.
So at the Golden Globes, and now that's the only chance I get to write one-liners.
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