Ricky Gervais has responded to a petition demanding Netflix remove a controversial joke from his new comedy special, calling out ‘faux’ outrage.
If this were a better joke, I’d be on Ricky’s side, but it’s not even really funny. He says something controversial, and then immediately sets it up as a strawman so he can play the victim of the outrage the joke is supposed to generate. The article is basically a continuation of the joke. I’m on the fence on if the woman who started the petition is actually real. This all feels like an ad to generate controversy and get people to watch the special, which, based on this clip, isn’t very good.
Care to write the joke here so I don’t have to give it clicks it doesn’t deserve?
So you can remove the timing and delivery inherent to joke telling and say “yep that sucks” to a transcript? Would you also read the script to a movie so you can say the acting sucked? Not picking on you personally, just saying.
Its a mediocre joke in the scheme of jokes, its pretty good if you know Rickys brand of comedy. Watch it or dont but form your own opinion.
I haven’t heard the Gervais joke so I’m not weighing in about that but I agree with your comment about not “reading” stand up comedy. Jim Jefferies did a skit about this. The joke he was referring to is also controversial but the point is, delivery matters. Here’s his bit about writing jokes
“What this lady did was she wrote an article about me, and she did a transcript of the actual routine in the article, wrote down every word I said. Now, I hate this. And I’ll tell you why. Because my whole skill in life is being able to say horrible things and still seem likable. [audience laughing] You take the whole… [grunts] out of it. See, if you read my material… it’s a bad read.”
I’d agree that it’s almost certainly fake controversy to act as an ad. What kind of petition has ever been made to remove individual jokes from a show? Angry people would demand the whole special be taken down, which frankly I’m all in favor of just taking down all of his shows and material. It would raise the overall average humor level of the whole service.
Have these people never seen Ricky Gervais? Poor taste is a huge part of his specific brand of humor.
If you don’t like it, don’t watch his shows. Problem solved.
Supporting and encouraging pedophillia is not something that you can just ignore. So no, problem not solved, and you’re part of it.
I can say with absolute certainty that he did not, at all, do that, and you’re just taking an offensive joke too seriously.
That’s his humor. If you don’t like it then don’t watch his specials.
Offensive jokes are jokes. What he did is supporting pedophilia under the excuse of it being a joke. Adding “lol” at the end of an unacceptable statement, or saying it in a funny way, or making an exaggeration of it, does not transform it into a joke.
If I say “lol immigrants are selfish so they deserve to die anyway” (another of his “jokes”) it’s not a joke, it’s just an obviously shitty statement coming from a piece of shit. Pretending that it’s a joke is pure hypocrisy and a very common way for people with shitty opinion to start screaming about cancel culture and censorship when they’re asked to stop.
Let me say things in another way. Even if you assume that it is a joke, then what is the joke about? The " joke" shows a character of a kid very, very explicitly and in details being raped by a pedo and enjoying it. Not only enjoying it, but asking for more and concluding with the idea that the kid ends up really happy with “a puppy, a kitten, and cum on the face”. With as I mentioned before the conclusion of “Oh, I miss the local pedo”. Not a single element of this “joke” pointed out that any of this is against pedophilia, or even just not supporting it. Dark humour is fine by me, but the point of dark humour is to mock horrible things by making jokes portraying the causes of those horrible things in a mocking manner. You can make a dark joke about racism, if the joke is made to mock racist people. If you mock black people, it’s not dark humour, it’s just racist. That’s it.
But go on, tell me what is funny about this “joke”. Is it to show pedophiles as not bad people? Or to show kids as enjoying rape? Or maybe to say that in the end, kids don’t mind pedophilia as long as you “pay them” enough to compensate?
Or maybe I should just not have bothered writing all this, just answered “you’re retarded and deserve to die lolol” and if someone complains, I’ll say it was just a joke.
Sorry, your opinion on the quality of the joke aside… are you unironically suggesting that Ricky Gervais is pro-pedophilia? That he literally thinks it should be legalised?
I don’t know his thoughts. But I know that he could not make that kind of jokes without at least being very complacent about pedophilia, and I would say that he probably considers that it’s not such a big issue.
But what he thinks ultimately doesn’t have so much importance, compared to what he is saying. No matter what he thinks, he is still normalising the idea that kids can be sexual, sexualised, and can enjoy it. These are basically the things that the worst pedos say as a justification (I’d randomly drop a name like Matzneff if you want to have a little wikipedia reading) to rape kids.
If you say that jews should be exterminated, are you a nazi? I would say that whether it’s the case or not, the impact of what you say serves the nazi ideology either way. And that’s enough for me to consider it a problem, especially if like in Gervais’ show, this message is completely unilateral and not defused at all.
I don’t know his thoughts. But I know that he could not make that kind of jokes without at least being very complacent about pedophilia, and I would say that he probably considers that it’s not such a big issue.
This is highly speculative. It is possible to make what might be considered revolting jokes about anything without actually endorsing it. Plenty of comedians have done this in the past.
If you say that jews should be exterminated, are you a nazi? I would say that whether it’s the case or not, the impact of what you say serves the nazi ideology either way. And that’s enough for me to consider it a problem, especially if like in Gervais’ show, this message is completely unilateral and not defused at all.
I’ve seen plenty of grim jokes about Jews in relation to the holocaust or nazi germany from people, but at no point did I think that they were literally endorsing the holocaust. Also, Gervais jokes about all sorts of things. Are you suggesting this ‘pro-pedophilia’ joke thing is some sort of continual theme or just a one-off joke?
Plenty of comedians are supporting plenty of shit. Being a comedian isn’t a free “say anything without any consequences” card, but many people consider it as such. There are ways to say things, and the way he did was, intentionally or not, endorsing pedophiles.
Also, how is it speculative to consider that miming child rape for easily 1-2 minutes (at least) non-stop means at least being complacent to it? If you are not complacent with rape, you wouldn’t mime it, and especially not for that long.
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This is highly subjective. If you don’t see it as a problem, it doesn’t mean that there is no underlying problem, simply that it doesn’t affect you. If you had been threatened by nazis as a jew, or if you had been a victim of pedophilia, I would expect that you’d have a different sensitivity about these jokes, considering that their concept is often to mock victims (and as such, supporting the authors of those acts).
As for the joke, I would say that a joke that lasts 5 minutes, casualizing child rape, then switching to saying that if a pedo doesn’t look crooked, everyone is fine with not arresting them, is enough to qualify it of a continuous theme. And either way, not being a continual theme wouldn’t make it less “pro-pedo”. If you support pedophilia in one joke, that’s one too much, and we’re talking about a celebrity, not about uncle Georges saying drunken shit at a family dinner with everyone around hoping he would die soon. It doesn’t matter if I “suggest” or not, the fact is that this guy depicted as funny and nice a scene of a kid being raped in a very graphic matter. Or maybe I should ask if you are suggesting that depicting child rape for entertainment can be tolerated?
It’s like what Frank Zappa said:
“I once wrote a song about dental floss and didn’t see anyone’s teeth getting any cleaner.”Thinking that someone saying whatever thing in any context is like a command to the mindless masses to go forth and do whatever thing, is quite an infantile way of seeing the world.
One time that idiot from the website formerly known as twitter, tweeted the following tweet:
“DOGE, DOGE, DOGE, DOGE, DOGE”
And some poor simple-minded fellow was outraged and alarmed:
“Elon’s pumping Doge again!”What a cartoon view one must have of the world to think that one idiot saying “Doge, Doge, Doge, Doge, Doge” compels other idiots to “BUY DOGE NOW” like mesmerized or frenzied zombies.
Many people seem to have little-to-no perspective about the tools and situations of humanity and the world, in depth, magnitude and/or priority. Narratives distorted to a weird abstract flatness.
Gervais advocated, unironically, pedophilia?
Of course not. These people are hand-wringing over jokes.
Miming a kid masturbating a pedo and saying that he’ll give a blowjob, implying the kid is both agreeing and enjoying it, and concluding the whole “joke” with “I miss the local pedo” seems hard to justify.
Gervais’ jokes were not only distasteful but also heartless,” and “a slap in the face to not only the children battling these serious illnesses…
honestly tho, the kids themselves might find it funny?.. it can be very cathartic to laugh at a demeaning joke aimed at you. (see: South Park)
It’s a bad joke in bad taste. He’s right it ultimately doesn’t matter, but it doesn’t take much to not write those jokes. And any parent that lost a child to terminal illness doesn’t want to hear that when they’re looking for a night of comedy
A Ricky Gervais joke in Ricky Gervais taste. Nothing you said here is wrong, but the dude is literally doing the same thing he always does. Maybe if you don’t wanna hear Ricky Gervais jokes don’t go watch him?
it’s sad to see a comedian who was once at the top of his game reduced to farming outrage on the internet
he says in the interview that people shouldn’t view his jokes as conveying any deeper meaning, which is just a depressing stance for a comedian to take
