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Feb. 2, 2024 - Where There's Woke - Thomas Smith
46:51
WTW38: Ricky Gervais's Pathetic Anti-Woke "Comedy" Special

Hey all, please enjoy this episode-length preview of our January Bonus! We watched Ricky Gervais's new "comedy" special and didn't laugh once. So we invited the funniest guy ever, Eli Bosnick, to join us on this one and bring back the joy to our lives that Ricky destroyed. If you'd like the full episode, make sure to pledge on patreon.com/wherethereswoke at the 2nd tier or above!

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Time Text
What's so scary about the woke mob?
How often you just don't see them coming.
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down.
The woke monster is here and it's coming for everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green Eminem will now wear sneakers.
Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
This is...
Most certainly and tangibly, numerically, episode, quantifiably, I would say.
Episode 38.
Yes.
Yeah.
Still not sure.
Yay, I did it.
Finally, the last of the month.
We did it, hon.
We made it.
Another crazy end of the month.
But, you know, enjoy these episodes and this flurry and, well, if you've gotten to this one, you already have, I guess.
Anyway.
We hope they've been as fun for you as they've been for us.
Yeah.
Speaking of fun, we're here to give you an episode length sample of the bonus for this month.
Now, the bonus each and every month is on patreon.com slash where there's woke.
It goes out to the second tier of patrons and above, but we also, when we can, we like to give everyone a nice solid chunk of it.
A little bit of a freebie.
Yeah, yeah.
Some podcasts just do like a five minute teaser, and I hate that.
That's not enough.
So I like that we both do a teaser and like enough of a thing that it's an episode.
And more Eli Bosnick in my life is always what I want, and maybe the listeners will agree as well, because we're talking about the Horrendously bad Ricky Gervais comedy special, if you can call it that, that won the Golden Globe for best comedy special.
First and only so far to win that.
And it's just an anti-woke pile of shit.
It's not funny in any way.
I don't think I smiled once watching it.
And we have a real comedian, Eli Bosnick, to help us break down why, to poke some fun, to get into the mind of
Just a totally addled by social media cranky has been like Ricky Gervais So we hope you enjoy this sample And if you want to hear the whole thing once again go to patreon.com slash where there's woke I get to that second tier of patronage and you'll also not have to hear any auto ads including one that I don't know is probably going right now if I had to guess Our special guest.
The person who matters.
Yes, the person who matters most.
Someone who... Ricky Gervais!
Oh boy.
Someone who I'm pretty sure, after watching this, I don't remember what comedy is, but I think I used to know, and I remember Eli being funny.
So I'm hoping he can help us diagnose this.
We're going to find it.
We're going to dive deep, deep.
Yes.
Let's just, this is so much better.
Guys, instead of talking about this absolutely abhorrent tirade and the fall of a human being, let's just punch up the special.
Ricky.
Okay.
So I love this.
The jerking off the older guy bit was good.
We can shorten that.
Oh yeah, that's not been done literally already by another cancelled comedian.
Rob Schneider.
Oh, him too.
They all do it.
What is it with these guys and wanting to mime?
They just want to jerk off a man who's so much taller than them.
Really interesting insight.
It was so long.
Can we start with how long the jerking off of the man was?
It was so long.
Yeah.
It was so uncomfortable.
Two seconds.
That beat, if you're going to do that beat.
Thank you.
It's exactly what I was going to say, Lydia.
Thank you.
Natural comedic timing.
You understand it.
Thank you.
It's two seconds.
You get jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk.
That's it.
That's it.
We got it.
When we're on the ninth jerk, now it's like weird porn.
Now we're watching it.
Yes!
Oh my god.
So we watched Ricky Gervais' Armageddon.
Well, this is Eli Bosnick.
I don't even think you said... No, I did.
I'm Eli Bosnick.
I think I said Eli.
That's close enough.
Eli Bosnick from Things That Are Actually Funny.
Yes.
Truly.
I have a hard time watching bad comedy, anything.
I get this depressed, scared feeling that there's not such a thing as humor anymore.
I really do.
For whatever reason, I'll never forget it.
I was in my teens and I turned on Jay Leno and watched his opening monologue.
It took me weeks to laugh again.
Yeah, you were just like, there's no such thing.
I cannot handle bad comedy, but I, you know, I do it.
I do.
I suffer for my art.
Certainly.
We're going to talk about Ricky Gervais' special with one Eli Bosnick, if I didn't say his name.
So thanks so much, Eli.
Armageddon!
It's called Armageddon.
It is called Armageddon.
You guys, this won the Golden Globe for best performance in stand-up comedy.
You say that as though that means something.
And I would just like to remind everyone that that really does not mean anything.
Like, I know it's hard to- But this is like- This is really bad.
Yeah, I'm absolutely with Lydia here because that's like if the Michael Richards YouTube rant had won a Golden Globe.
So many things should have come in between this and a Golden Glove.
Oh my God.
Okay.
So I know everyone knows this, but the Golden Gloves is a fake award ceremony.
The judges are literally Hollywood foreign press.
It's just journalists who live in LA who write about Hollywood for other, like there's like 50 other countries represented.
So all you're saying is, like, we found a group of people who thought this was, like, the funniest thing.
It's already self-disqualifying.
Like, oh, OK, so you found idiots to judge something, and I don't care what they think.
Ooh, this should have been a test for, like, hey, did you enjoy that special?
And they're like, yeah.
And they're like, oh, you don't get to vote in the Golden Globes anymore.
I'm sorry.
Yes, yeah.
You have to vote for the Oscars.
Yeah, I think also what's especially depressing about this too is that, from my understanding, it's the first time that the Golden Globes has had this category.
So Ricky Gervais is the inaugural winner.
Yeah.
And, like, that's depressing.
Whew!
Opening it up with Ricky Gervais's angry rants about his Twitter.
Yeah.
They've had a comedy album, but this is the first time they added a comedy special, apparently.
And, you know, I know I've mentioned it before, but just in case, I cannot tell you, I forget if I've talked to you about this, Eli, but I cannot tell you what a big fan of The British Office and Extras I was.
Like, I was the biggest Ricky Gervais fan ever, from like 2000...
I came across the office a little bit late, but it was like 2005, I wanna say, or 2007 or something, and then Extras is so fucking funny.
It is so good.
It just, it hurts so bad to have some of my, truly, my favorite things.
Like, just, you know, little scenes and lines I remember and are in my brain and little moments. - You're having a laugh. - David Bowie, yeah, the David Bowie Extras, the Gandalf one that gets shared for everyone.
Yeah those That's what I love about it.
Sir Ian, Sir Ian, Sir Ian, Sir Ian.
It's incredible.
It's all incredible.
And to have that just, it's not, you know, maybe I'll watch it again, but it's not like, oh no, I can't watch it because I feel so dirty.
It's not that.
It's just like fucking bummer, man.
It's just a bummer.
You know, it's just like, ah, those delightful memories I have of enjoying the funniest shit is just now, why do you have to turn into such a fucking unfunny asshole?
Yeah.
It's brain poison, man.
Here, let's take a second.
Let's step over into the serious zone and talk about why, if you are a content creator of any kind, I don't care if you make knitting patterns or you draw fucking Crayola crayons on the walls of your local high school, whatever you do, get the fuck away from social media.
Because it will poison your goddamn brain.
And if you don't have a friend, and if you don't have a therapist, who will be like, hey, Ricky, just don't say any of those things.
Like, I know people write mean shit on Twitter, and that sucks, man, but no one cares.
Nobody fucking cares about the mean tweets you got, man.
Yes, they're annoying.
They're annoying, mean tweets.
I'm sorry you got them.
Your friends and loved ones will hug you, and then you talk about Other things.
Because the problem is, this is comedy problem especially, comedians identify injustices using empathy.
What's the deal with airline food is the fact that we all don't like airline food.
It is an empathetic experience.
The reason it's hack is because it's universally relatable and it's been overdone.
But you know what's not a universally relatable experience?
Being a multi-millionaire whose jokes people don't like.
And that is the entire Ah, you're fucking special!
That's it.
That's it.
It's literally it.
Now, Ricky Gervais, I'll be honest, even when I was a huge fan, his stand-up wasn't very good.
He's not a good stand-up.
He's good in his roles and maybe in written comedy, but- He would disagree with you.
Yeah.
No, truly, even when I was a huge fan, I was like, eh, stand-up was like, whatever.
It's not that good.
So he has, I think, three for Netflix.
And I remember watching the previous one.
Which was, of course, an offensive fucking garbage monster.
But at the very least, I recognized there were jokes.
Like, there were jokes.
There were a few things in there that I was like, okay, so yeah, there's a little bit of humor at least mixed in with the transphobia and everything.
Okay, at least he's writing jokes, so I could see why people might laugh at that and just ignore the transphobia.
Now, there aren't jokes.
It's just...
I am an asshole.
End of special.
That's all it is.
He thinks it's so funny.
I've never seen someone think they were so fucking funny and be so right.
It's amazing.
Well, what's weird is because Gervais on stage doing stand-up was a very specific character He was this snobby multi-millionaire who was out of touch, who was mean, who was cruel, but like, it was done broadly and with a wink.
When you look at his early specials, especially the BBC ones, like I Wonder and, oh I forget what I Wonder is called in the United States, but it's called I Wonder in the UK.
You look at those early specials, it was actually really interesting, right?
Because it was someone who was famous and rich confronting the fact that they were famous and rich.
What would it be like if the person I play on TV came out here and tried to do stand-up?
And it was funny and it punched in the right directions and it was excellent.
And then what happened is, we literally watched him from that last special, the one before this one, go from a character who is out of touch and says unkind things, to the literal man being out of touch and saying unkind things.
And so transparently not being a character, and then also still claiming that's somehow a character.
We know this isn't a character now, and you're still being like, Relax, it's a character that I play 24-7 and on social media and just live all the time.
He goes so far to equate what he's doing as to what Sir Anthony Hopkins did as Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs and saying, like, well, are you actually a cannibal to Anthony Hopkins?
And he's like, no, I'm a character.
And he's like, that's me, too.
It makes no sense.
But if Anthony Hopkins was tweeting every reply was like, you look real delicious, we'd be like, hey man.
Pictures of his actual victims.
We'd be like, wow.
You're eating people, man.
In the metaphor, you won't stop eating people.
And also, and look, this is always the thing that doesn't get said.
Because again, we could talk all day about the crazy feedback that you get, right?
We are a fraction of the size of Ricky Gervais.
A fraction of a fraction.
And me and Thomas get an email every three months about, it's funny you should say you care about X when you want to kill all the snakes in the world.
We've gotten four of those motherfuckers.
Four times a human being has been like, you want to kill all the snakes in the world.
But you, podcast listener, you don't care about that, which is why it's not included in our fucking comedy special!
The important thing to emphasize, right, because it is completely natural to be afraid of outrage culture.
It is completely natural to understand that there are certain elements of the left online that behave badly.
What you also have to understand is is that it is not anywhere close to a problem except for anyone but racist millionaires, right? - Yeah. - Yeah. - The only people for whom this is a major life-shattering problem are people who hear the feedback of, "Hey, I was really hurt by that thing you said," and then double down and make it their entire career. - He literally just reads tweets.
Like, if anyone hasn't seen this, like, we're not, that wasn't an exaggeration.
Eli, we've had some zingers.
We've had some people, you know, the one you mentioned might be, if I just, just in a, in a, in a, you and I are having a romantic candle at dinner and I'm trying to make you laugh.
And I'm like, Hey, you should see this time that I, Oh man, I told this guy off on Twitter and I was, I was a genius in it.
And you should like, let me read it.
Let me hold on.
Stop the conversation.
Let me read you an exchange I had.
And you're going to, you're going to laugh.
Cause I was so awesome.
And this guy just sucked.
Like you'd be like, And I said, and he said, and I said, God.
And that's just if we were friends.
He thinks all of us are interested in that time he was a genius on Twitter to a random nobody that we don't even know.
It's nothing, man.
That's nothing.
And also in a public space that people who do care would have already seen it because they're following Ricky Gervais.
So yeah, it's just not interesting at all.
You know, there was a petition that went out after the special came out regarding specifically his jokes on pediatric cancer and kids literally dying from cancer.
And it was a mother of someone who their child has cancer and is really, really struggling.
And she had a problem with some of the jokes.
I'm sure we'll get into it.
He decided to take that moment and refer to her as a heckler.
And he just didn't need to do that.
I mean, I think it ended up with maybe 13,000 signatures.
And it's just, it's so cruel and unkind.
If you get above 13,000 signatures, you execute the person.
So it's a real threat to Ricky Gervais.
Well, and that's a really good example, right?
Because I think something useful that we can have the conversation about here is like, look, not all criticism of comedy is valid.
But there is a huge difference between being like, hey, I'm really sorry you're in pain because of that thing that you didn't like those jokes and it caused you pain.
Obviously not my intention.
And Going after that person and bullying them.
Yeah.
That is a person in an excruciating amount of psychic pain right now and they are lashing out for bad reasons because the social internet's a fucking poison.
Yeah.
But you know who should have never seen that tweet?
Multi-millionaire Ricky Gervais.
There's absolutely no reason for Ricky to be fucking scrolling through Twitter hearing whatever the hell comes out of someone's head about his most recent spate of jokes, right?
You wonder what drove him into being the unfunny monster he is.
We put his brain on the Skinnerian poison machine, and then we were like, I wonder how this guy got confused about what's important.
I want to play just, like, the first little bit of this.
Listen to how this starts.
Welcome to my new show.
So new, in fact, it's still evolving.
I've got bits tonight I haven't done before, right?
If I had Lib, I haven't even thought it before.
And I have some terrible fucking thoughts.
But you can't help that, can you?
You can't choose your thoughts.
They just appear.
It's too late.
You have a thought and it goes, I'm a thought.
And you go, oh, this is just the key problem that Ricky doesn't seem to understand.
It's so elementary.
You shouldn't feel bad if you have a bad thought, but you should feel bad if you don't stop yourself from saying it.
For a hundred million people on Netflix?
It's the weirdest thing!
You're embodying the worst part of our worst intentions.
Everyone has bad thoughts.
Everyone has mean thoughts.
Everyone thinks cruel things.
You wrote them down and then sent them to thousands and millions of people on the internet.
That's why people are mad, right?
This isn't surveillance footage that I hacked into his net kit or whatever.
After a hard night of lactose intolerance.
And again, I think that is the problem that the social internet brings out in us, right?
Is that the social internet has made us all feel like we're all performing all the time and everyone has become a brand and a product and a thing and no one's just a person anymore, right?
And so all of your life blends into this so-called persona so that he literally does not know the difference between, I mean, we've all had some pretty bad thoughts and I'm going to say these things on Netflix.
Yeah.
One of the reasons why his comedy in, for me, The Office and Extras were the two shows that were my favorite, he played a character, and that was a literal character.
You couldn't really argue that that's not a character.
You know why?
Because it's a fucking TV show, which is a lot different than when you're doing a stand-up special.
Like, it's just a different thing.
But anyway.
The point is, he played a character who was not always self-aware, and there was a ton of comedy in that.
And saying things, even offensive things, in my book, doesn't have to be for everyone, but if you say offensive things in a character, and the point of the joke is that you're roasting that character, like the target is that character, and maybe you say some offensive things, and there are lines that you can draw, you know, people can have their preferences, that's one thing.
So for me, it's not so much about, oh, did he use a particular word in a particular way?
It's not that.
It's that we know you're not doing a character anymore, man.
And like, if you're just saying these things because you think it's funny to make people sad, truly for me, it isn't about the precise words.
Oh, if he just had rephrased the thing and used a word that's, no, it's, it's not that at all.
It's the whole project of what you're doing.
Right.
You are not doing a character anymore, and we know that now.
You've revealed yourself, and you can't pretend that that's what you're doing anymore.
Yeah, I mean, it's Gilbert Gottfried who says comedy is empathy plus surprise.
The fact that we all recognize the punchline, oh my gosh, you know, why did the chicken cross the road?
To get to the other side.
Oh, that is why people cross the road.
I have an empathetic reaction to that, but I didn't expect it to be a literal response.
That's the surprise.
That's why that joke is funny.
Now, it can be more or less funny, But what we're seeing in this special, and the reason why it's so key to understand this, is like, there's no empathy here.
Which is why the audience, and again, I texted this to Lydia and Thomas while we were watching it, is the most bizarre comedy audience I've ever seen.
It's just people playing to like a schoolyard bully.
Like if you brought on two 11 year olds and one pants the other one, they'd be making the exact same noises.
There's four laughs in the entire special and everything else is just like, get him!
It's nuts.
It's nuts.
It's not comedy.
No, it is not.
You can feel the sort of chill in the room.
There's also, and I know this is a weird thing to point out, but it is something worth noting.
He does a lot of like rolling his eyes at the audience and being like, that's the one that's going to get me in trouble, isn't it?
And like, here's the thing.
Again, as a performer, I can tell you there are times where people are upset with the jokes that I make, and I think their upset is silly, right?
I don't want them to be sad, but their upset is silly.
We don't, in fact, want to kill all the snakes.
Fix yourself.
Except for Thomas, who, of course, is a one-man snake killing machine.
I'm playing a character.
It's a character.
Just stop directing the emails to Eli and send them straight to Travis.
Yes, exactly.
At least just stop emailing them to me.
In all seriousness, we do not want to kill all the snakes.
Even though that person's pain, I'm sure they are really feeling it, it is an invalid thing.
But I don't bask in the joy of it.
No, yeah, it's just sad.
I'm not going on to my comedy shows being like, I sure hope no snake lovers are listening to this one.
And that's really the problem, right?
The perspective here, right?
It's so pathetic.
We agree that we hate these people who I'm hurting.
And that's what's so poisonous.
Yeah.
And to build off that, let me, here, I'll play the rest of the clip.
I didn't even get through it because it's so dumb.
You can't get through much of this without being mad, but there's a, there's a, yeah, there's a part in the beginning I really want to make sure we get to that speaks to exactly what you're saying, Eli.
And then sometimes the thought will go, now say it.
Oh, and then you just don't.
And then you don't, yeah.
And I say it.
And then you just don't.
Wow.
Netflix.
He's not in control of himself.
That's a problem.
My last show, Supernature, dropped on Netflix last year.
Yeah, listen to this.
Big backlash, wasn't there?
Big, oh, big backlash.
People going, you can't say that.
You can.
You can.
I did.
The inevitable backlash, which made it the most watched special of the year, so... I've learnt my lesson.
No, I have learned my lesson.
I see a lot of people writing about, like, oh, you say he's not punching up, he's punching down.
Well, no.
He is punching up, because you know who has all the power?
The angry mob of social justice woke blah-biddy-blah.
They're the real power now, so he's punching up on them.
I've truly read, like, I might read some of a piece I read that says just that, but then he just gives up the game.
I don't understand.
He simultaneously is the biggest victim in the world, And it's like, I can't say anything.
You complain about me saying it.
The book mob makes me not say it.
Anyway, you can say it.
I won an award.
It's the top fucking thing on Netflix.
I make a million zillion dollars.
I'm back doing another special.
Then what the fuck are we talking about?
Are you silenced or aren't you silenced?
I can't tell, man.
Well, and again, this is the problem, right?
Because his lived experience of that bad feedback mattered to him, one, more than the lived experience of the people who were hurt by it, which is a problem, right?
There's already something to be talking to a therapist about.
Yeah.
But also, it's not something to base a comedy special on, right?
Like, again, we could say this, as content creators, Lydia, I'm not sure how much you've gotten to get because you're fairly new to the game, but being a woman, I can imagine it's Awesome, right?
The amount of people who feel entitled to your time and your space and to say the absolute fucking worst shit in the universe to you is a bummer.
But that is for your therapist, not Netflix, right?
Like that is really what he fails to understand here.
So you say.
I'm typing up my email pitch right now, actually.
Stop liking my Thirst Traps, the Netflix special.
But yeah, it's just, it is bizarre.
Also, I just want to, again, because I'm so fixated on this audience.
Yeah.
So there's this term in stand-up called get engaged, which is that if you're coming out and you sort of need to bring the audience up, you say like, I got engaged recently and the audience will go, Doesn't matter if you're funny, not funny, what you look like, who you are, how tall you are, you can come out and you can set the audience at woo by saying, I was engaged recently.
That entire first monologue is five, I got engaged woos.
There's no jokes.
It's just him being like, who here voted for a Republican, even though you pretend you don't like them.
- Five times in a row. - I was gonna say, but the get engaged is like, I'm a piece of shit the other day.
And then everyone's like, yeah, you are a piece of shit. - And his audience is like, we're pieces of shit too, yeah. - That is so relatable to me.
Yeah, and the whole shtick of, I'm gonna say, Eli, I'm gonna say something bad I'm gonna say- It's gonna be bad.
I'm gonna say something- I can't.
I can't do it.
I'm gonna say something really bad and it's gonna be so- Wouldn't it be so funny if I said something that's bad?
Wouldn't- Oh my- I'm gonna do it!
I'm gonna- And then you say something bad and it's like, boy, there's a whole, what was the funny part?
What was the joke part of that?
What is the empathetic experience of that?
Forget that.
What is the joke?
Literally, what's the joke?
There are no ha-has.
There's not even a joke.
So often in the special, he just states an opinion that people don't feel comfortable saying straight, so that they can woo at it.
A really good example of it is the bit where he's like being God making humans, and the angel asks him how many sexes there are, and he's like, two, just two.
Again, it's not a joke, it's just a thing that he wants to say, because it will hurt the people's feelings, That he imagines send him mean tweets.
He has created an imaginary, and look, look, again, I want to be honest here, and I want to say, as someone who had to quit Twitter because of the out-of-pocket batshit stuff people felt entitled to say to me on a regular basis, I get it.
I really do.
I get being hurt by tweets, but I'm not bringing it on to GAM just like, hey, wait one second, we'll talk about John L. James Parker and the crawling theocracy of the United States in a second.
Let me tell ya.
What this snake guy emailed today.
It's just, it's not when you lose touch with your humanity, that's when you make entire comedy specials about hurting imaginary other people's feelings.
Yeah.
Oh, speaking of imaginary, let me go to my next clip unless anyone had anything.
Talk about telling a friend later that like, oh, and then he said this, and then I said, well, I didn't say anything, but I would have said, you know, it's like the ultimate version of that.
Listen to this made up nothing.
You're inventing a fake person and being mad at them.
That's most of anti-woke stuff, actually.
It's just pathetic.
Like, here's an example.
If I was on a beach and a woman came running up and went, help, help, my handicapped toddler's drowning, I'd go, sorry, you're what, love, what?
My handicapped toddler's drowning and he can't swim.
Whoa!
Do you mean your disabled toddler is drowning?
She goes, yeah.
I go, right.
Well, let's... Oh, dead.
That's not- It's so dumb.
Obviously it's not real, but it's also not reminiscent of anything real.
There's nothing- Right, there's no connection to reality.
No one would ever do that?
Ever?
Yeah.
No one is dying while we figure out the language that doesn't hurt people's feelings.
Literally doesn't happen.
Never happens.
Not once.
Never happens once.
Not a single time.
You know when it would feel like that?
If you were a millionaire and said offensive things on your last special, and the only feedback you got was people whose feelings were hurt, you would say, well, no one has told me recently that their toddler is drowning, but they have told me that I used a word that hurt their feelings.
Therefore... I bet they are so dumb that if a toddler were drowning, they would...
Do that!
And it's like, you can't just create a character that's the dumbest fucking idiot in the world.
And everyone else is living that experience as well.
Yeah.
And that's the other thing too, is like, this is the thing that I always worry about, right?
Is not the Gervaises of the world or the Joe Rogans or the Dawkinses, right?
Because a part of them is just playing to a new audience.
They feel like they've lost their leftist audience, and their rightist audience is loyal and ugly, and they just eat and consume whatever it is they want, right?
So they're just playing to the crowd.
It's doing the ugliest form of crowd work available in comedy at this current time.
But like, there's no way that people sitting in that theater making those weird woo noises can relate to that experience.
Are they walking around their everyday lives and being like, I'll tell you, I can't tell you how many times I have been corrected this month, whether or not it's handicapped or disabled.
Ricky gets it, boy.
I'll tell you what.
That's what's so fascinating is because, wow, in the same way that rich fucking bazillionaires and oil tycoons and blah, blah, blah, blahs utilize this stuff in order to get poor people to be like rooting for them politically.
You know, that's basically the entire Republican Party.
Yeah.
In the same way, this fake, the whole reason for our show, like pointing out this fake alternate reality these people live in is so effective that you're right.
He can find an audience that will react to the things he's saying that aren't real, but they're so in that fake fucking alternate reality where this happens all the time.
It's nonstop.
Like to your point, Eli, you probably, if you asked him like, Hey, what, what is, why does this resonate?
When did it ever happen?
Well, you know, it does happen.
Like, you know, like I heard this guy that no one has a story of this really.
And if they do, it's probably the dumbest thing.
No one's got a personal story.
And what happens, because again, Thomas and Lydia and I, we have all been on this, right?
Because we all have the person who's like, you leftist piece of shits.
You've destroyed my life.
And I want you to know that if it weren't for you, I'd be sitting on a sunlit mountain right now.
And when you get down to it, right, when you're like, hey, man, I'm an idiot and I haven't learned to get off Twitter yet.
"What happened in your life?" They're like, "My boss fired me for jerking off onto the toilet seat." And you're like, "Okay, well that has nothing to do with fucking what we said on serious increase only from 2014 to 2016." Right?
And again, when they run out of pretend examples that Joe Rogan gave them, which is what they always give you first, right?
They'll be like, "Kids are pooping in litter boxes." And you're like, "Oh, no, that's not real.
Here, let's look at Snopes.
And they'll be like, 20 minutes of back and forth about, you can't trust Snopes, because one time he done saw ladies' tooties.
But then eventually, you do get into the like, hey, we agree on these facts.
And they'll be like, when my grandpa died, he left every grandkid something but me.
And you're like, hey man, that fucking sucks.
What are we talking about right now?
Oh, God.
All right, here's another incredible joke, I guess.
Words change, yeah?
And that's part of the reason I'm going to become woke.
Words change, and I don't want to be left behind, you know?
I don't want to end up like my granddad in the 70s.
He was all like, colored's this and queer's that.
Although the word queer is all right again now.
So if you wait long enough, it just goes full circle.
Okay, pause for a second.
Because I find that super fascinating, right?
Because there is a part of him, right?
And I think we tend to go too far and we're like, Ricky Gervais was never funny.
Ricky Gervais was very, very funny.
He was an excellent comedy writer and an excellent actor.
I think he was an excellent actor too, honestly.
Actor and writer and person who was able to identify with these essential qualities of us.
And I think that that genius never really goes away.
I think it just gets buried under pain and mental illness.
It's applied to the wrong things.
Exactly, yeah.
Because it becomes about, you get swallowed by your own pain.
And you can no longer see your way out to the people you once used to be able to communicate with.
And I think this bit is such an essential way to see into it.
Because he has this moment where he's like, yeah, I mean, my grandfather sucked.
I don't want to fall into that trap.
And then he falls into that trap!
It's fascinating!
Well, it's the message that he's giving us here, and this is why it's not a character.
Like, stand-up, first off, you can say stand-up is somewhat a character.
I get it a little bit, but it's also not.
You're giving your opinions, and I think it's really cheap to hide behind that.
Like, the minute someone's upset about something you said, then it's all just a character, blah, blah, blah.
But if you ever make, like, a good point, like some of the stand-up we look back on is like, oh man, this person was ahead of their time in roasting the powers that be over this.
Well, no, that's not a character.
That was real.
It's only the things you didn't like when it's a character.
And the whole point of this is, I think it's, I'm not sure if this is a disagreement or not, but the whole point of that bit is you should not listen to what the complainers say because it's stupid.
You know why I prove it's stupid?
Because it started at one place.
Oh, you shouldn't use this word.
And now in the year 2024, we've gotten to the point where now you can use the words that they didn't use to say.
And so therefore the whole thing is stupid.
It's inarguably the message of the joke.
Are you supposed to say that, yeah, but that message is a fake message.
But why are you doing it then?
I don't understand what, like, you know what I mean?
What's your point?
Right.
If the point is that you don't want to be like your grandfather, because essentially what your grandfather did is he hated people for being different and he said things that hurt their feelings.
You can't possibly have come to the conclusion that now it's okay to hate people for being different and say things that hurt their feelings.
And yet, that is what the whole special is about.
Yeah.
Did you want to play the rest of it?
Yes, play the rest because I think this is really essential.
Sure.
So yeah, you can use the word queer.
You still can't use it as a noun, only as an adjective.
You can't go up to someone and go, you're a queer.
But you can go, hear about Darren?
He's queer now.
If Darren is definitely bent, you can't go around just slagging off Darren willy-nilly, do you know what I mean?
You can get sued in this country for saying someone's gay if they're not, you know, which is a homophobic law because you can't be sued the other way around.
You can't be sued for saying someone's not gay if they are, which seems unfair, doesn't it?
I haven't looked into that, but it actually wouldn't surprise me if, because I know in this country there are certain things, it's not about not being able to sue per se, and this is in America, I don't know the fucking, the way it works over there, who knows, but there are certain things where you don't have to prove, you have less of a burden.
Yeah, so like the only thing I could think of is that it has to do with the, you know, the different standard for defamation out in the UK.
But then you would still have to demonstrate that being called gay when you're not gay led to some sort of harm.
Well, but it may be that, so like in America, there are certain categories where you automatically get that you don't have to prove that this caused you financial harm.
Because otherwise you have to be like, yeah, and here are my damages.
He said that I was bad at basketball, and that was bad for me because, and it's actually a big burden to try to prove that legally.
It's actually kind of difficult.
And there are certain things where if they're said about you, you don't have to do that.
So if someone claims you're a lecherous character, you know, and it'll be that old-timey language, like a loathsome disease.
Say, for example, you accuse two Christian filmmaking brothers of a very specific crime that they didn't do.
On your podcast, a lot of times with very specific details you made up.
That is, yeah, that turns out to be just defamation no matter what.
Doesn't fall under satire.
What blows my mind is that he's actually, I don't know what the state of the lie is, but he actually might be being accurate here in that I could imagine that Especially in old timey times, it would make sense that a homophobic society would say, well, yeah, if you call someone gay, that's like the worst thing you can call someone.
So like, you don't even have to prove damages there.
But yeah, if you called someone straight that to them, that wouldn't, to that society, it wouldn't make sense to say, yes, you can sue them.
For calling you straight.
That just wouldn't occur to a society that was homophobic or even like, honestly, that's just not an insult that carries much weight.
And that's important because defamation is a thing where you are defaming someone in an effective way.
Like it wouldn't, it's not, it wouldn't be a harm if you weren't causing any harm.
And so he accurately identifies possibly that probably comes from homophobic origin.
If you think being called gay is a super, super deep insult, I think that says something about how you feel about gay people.
And then he uses that fact to be homophobic.
Like the very homophobia of that law, that also is somehow like something the woke is doing to him or something.
It's the weirdest thing.
Am I crazy?
He tries a reversal with it, right?
Where he's like, if I told Elton John he was straight, he wouldn't go fuck a guy to prove me wrong.
Right.
But it's like, But what you're not acknowledging is exactly what you were just talking about, Thomas, which is that it used to be wildly harmful to be those things.
And again, that's sort of the, like, equality.
In the eyes of society, yeah.
Right, yeah, you could end up in jail, and yeah.
Right, it's the, like, equality versus equity thing, right?
Which is like, we all get started at the race at the same time, but you're in a car and I'm on a unicycle, right?
And that's so often what comes out when these millionaires and billionaires and rich people from tremendous privilege are talking about what they perceive as inequality is that they have never met anyone who is not in a car in this race.
So hearing this person gets to start a little bit early because they're on a unicycle or even it's unfair that you're in a car doesn't make perfect equal sense to them because the only way things have ever been fair is everyone starting in the same place, which again, they've never met anyone who isn't starting where they are.
I did want to play a little bit from another part, which is just again, I mean.
My message for this, and feel free, you can email us, tell me the joke.
Just tell me the joke.
Because I'm not like, believe it or not, I promise you I'm not like a super woke police comedy whatever person.
I really am not.
But what has happened to Ricky Gervais is there aren't jokes.
Like you can't just hide behind the fact that like, oh, you're just offended because he's doing, it's like, no, he's stopped doing humor.
He's just doing the cruelty part.
That's not a joke.
There's nothing funny there!
For me to say, it's the perfect crime.
You can say whatever you want, people get mad, and then you use that as an excuse for what you're saying, and then you rinse and repeat.
And every one of your asshole, rabid fans always has that defense mechanism.
If anyone says it's not funny, then you can just say, well, that's because you're one of the snowflakes who gets offended.
All the while, you haven't made a single fucking joke.
And you still get to collect $200.
And it also, it soothes the worst pain, which is as a public person, when you are told, hey, you don't deserve that position, right?
You should not be there anymore.
You have abused it.
You are wrong, right?
You are useless.
Whatever, whatever that case may be, whatever horrible shit people say to you, right?
The thing that the audience of the right offers them is it tells them that they're brave.
That they are overcoming a temporary adversity and that they will be proven right in the end, right?
I think genuinely, and I know this is going to sound like maybe perhaps Pollyanna, but I genuinely think some of the comedians playing to the right right now genuinely believe that quote, when all is said and done, they will be known as like visionaries who weren't afraid to stand up to bullies because that's the promise their audience is making them.
Yeah, and that's what they're also giving to their audience, as you say, like that, again, it's the same way that, yeah, we're all just temporarily embarrassed billionaires or whatever the thing is.
It's, I think that's actually, now that I think about it, I think it's the same dynamic.
We're all, look, I, yeah, it's funny to me because, you know, but for a few little decisions going a different way in my life, I'm sure I'm this close to being a billionaire and being annoyed by these tweets, you know, like there, but for like, I'm this close.
But listen to this sequence and just, like, what's the joke?
Tell me the joke.
If you're 20 now, in 40 years time, you're going to be in your house, wearing a mask, crying.
Yeah.
Like you do now over jokes.
Yeah, that's what we do.
Yeah.
And I'm not going to be around to see that, but I am going to spend my entire fortune from now on on private jets to make sure it definitely fucking happens.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE We're going to be the first generation that future generations are jealous of, right?
Because we had it all and we're using it all up.
We're using up all the fresh water.
We're using up all the fossil fuel, right?
Usually you look back in history and you feel sorry for it.
You go, oh, how did they live like that?
Oh, how did they get around?
No indoor toilets.
I've got nine toilets in my house.
And sometimes I just run around flushing them for a laugh.
Just so that in 40 years' time, Greta Thunberg has to shit out of a window.
So I just have to say very quickly that this show is called Armageddon.
The description on Netflix says, Ricky Gervais dishes out controversial takes on political correctness and oversensitivity in a taboo busting comedy special about the end of humanity.
This is like one minute out of maybe two minutes, 30 seconds in the entire special where he talks about anything that could be construed close to that at all.
Everything else is just anti-woke nonsense.
Sorry, I had to get that out.
No, it's so important.
Yeah.
Also, and look, I know people have heard me talk about subject-object ad infinitum, but think about who the object of that joke is.
It's Greta Thunberg.
The person who needs to be taken down a notch, the punchline of that joke is climate activist Greta Thunberg.
Yep.
Like, how bad is your world—how disturbed, how sad, how other-hating is your worldview that your thought is, you know who needs to be taken down?
the child who is famous for being worried about climate change.
- Which you acknowledge is real too.
- Yeah.
- Which you acknowledge is real.
- He's not a climate change denier.
At least if he were, then like that's consistent with his worldview.
But to your point and what I've been trying to get at, what is the fucking joke?
What is it?
It's like, well, yeah, climate change is real and like the world's gonna be ruined and all that.
But like, don't complain about it.
Like what, I don't understand what, what's the message?
Or it's, it's funny and I don't care.
Like that, I think that has become a big part of it.
Right.
And I think if we actually look at like the mindset of the anti-woke, not what they say is their mindset, That's also a problem is like hyper psychoanalyzed language has seeped all across discourse so that like right wing people are now good at hiding what they mean when they talk about what they mean.
Because, you know, they used to just be like, I don't want them here!
But now it's like, I guess I'm just worried that, like, each individual, you know, needs to learn to be proud of themselves, you know?
It's okay to be white!
And you're like, oh, fuck, shit!
Yeah, you tricked me!
Like, really layered dog whistling.
Right, exactly.
The dog whistling, but also just like the self-edification through language that's spread, especially through the social internet, because we're just feeding each other like sound bites of bullshit to say on a regular basis, right?
So you can just pick up like a well-written tweet by Ben Shapiro and then throw it at me and be like, this is what I think.
And I know you don't think that, right?
You've never thought that.
And he's a professional liar with a team full of professional liars writing his lies for him.
But like, we're all so stuck on the like, the social internet is one person writing one message as opposed to like, the dead internet, which is vastly representative of the truth.
And so the thing that comes up here with this climate change stuff, is it's almost him going back to the old character, right?
The rich, out of touch millionaire character.
And I think if we had Ricky Gervais on this podcast, one, we'd have a lot more money.
And two, I think the defense he would make is, yeah, well, look at my old specials where I talk about not shaking people's hands after the show or where I'm reading the coloring book and talking about how stupid the coloring book is, right?
Like, my character is out of touch.
The audience isn't laughing at him.
They're laughing at Greta Thunberg and the future suffering of children.
That is absolutely it.
They are not laughing at him.
They are laughing like they are with him on the joke.
Absolutely.
One million, that's a great way of putting it.
And they might pretend otherwise, but they're lying.
That is what, like, like you say, they have the ability to try to rationalize it in a way that seems palatable because they're liars.
But yeah, they've constructed a perfect like fucking tortoisesque shell they can hide in.
Any criticism, they have the answer for it.
If you ignore it, well, then it goes uncriticized, then he gets to do what he wants.
If you criticize it, well, you're one of these woke who just blah-biddy-blah.
And depending on how you criticize it, he can bring out, or a fan of his can bring out those different defenses, like you're saying.
They can say, no, the joke is, like, he's saying such awful things.
Like, that's the joke.
And it's like, really?
I don't believe you, actually.
I think the joke is that you harbor a resentment of Greta Thunberg.
And ha ha, now I get to imagine her being in a bad position in the future.
That's funny.
Because what does Greta Thunberg represent to that audience?
She represents a younger generation that is disappointed in you.
Yeah, and no coincidence, she's a girl.
And she's a woman.
And willing to call them out.
Right, willing to call them out, is not socialized in the way that we want her to be socialized.
I mean, we go on and on about why people take issue with Greta Thunberg, but what she represents to that audience, the reason why they want her to be the subject of the joke, is she represents young people's disappointment in the life choices and decisions that you made.
And I think this is something that every generation goes through.
I mean, I don't know if you have a boomer in your life, but if you have brought up the boomer millennial zennial divide to a boomer, even an incredibly progressive one, they will stop you and be like, no, wait a second.
Okay.
Right.
Because it's hard to have your generation condemned.
It's hard to feel like maybe you were part of some generational mistakes, or that you could have dorned more than you wanted to, or that you're being judged more harshly than you would like your generation to be judged.
And so, boomers have done, and millennials will do this too, and zennials will do it after them.
Every generation does.
We do what every generation does, is we turn it back around on the kids and we say, this is your fault, you're too sensitive, woke is just the most recent word we came up for for it.
All right, that's it for the preview.
Sorry, but you know, that's how it goes.
And if you want to hear more, of course, go to patreon.com slash where there's will get to that second tier of Patreon.
If not, well, we'll see you next time.
And we hope you're going to want to be there.
You're going to want to be there, folks.
If not, you're canceled.
And you'll have to do a comedy special.
No, we shouldn't tell them that.
Then they'll win the Golden Globe.
Yeah, exactly.
Never mind.
You're not canceled.
Uncanceled.
All right.
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