Whenever Ricky Gervais drops a special on Netflix, controversy is expected, due to what the comedian describes as his freely expressed thoughts.
His views often did not sit well with his fellow comedians. Nish Kumar, for example, a comic in his 2019 show, slammed him for “punching them down.”
“F*** Ricky Gervais. F*** Ricky Gervais. What he’s doing isn’t edgy or interesting… he is the same as every other rich white dude comedian who gets too successful, runs out of ideas and decides to s*** on the latest minority group,” he said in his stand-up special.
Ricky, in turn, addresses these attacks on his latest streamer, titled Mortality. It was recorded earlier this year at the London Palladium.
In an unconcerned way, the After Life creator responds, “They’ve always failed. I’m too old now not to say what I want. I want to say and do what I want all the time. I want to do my favourite thing all the time.”
But fellow comics were not the only target of Ricky’s witty quips. Social media is one of them.
He slams what he describes as people policing comedy in the digital world, which he says is known as ‘cancel culture’
“With the advent of social media, people suddenly discovered they could just say they were virtuous. No evidence, no proof, just loads of flags in their bio,” he avers.
“And they would raise their status by bringing other people down, catching other people out … And that’s where the term virtue signalling comes from, right?”
“The most annoying thing about virtue signallig is people being smug about having the morality of the age. You’re what you’re like because of where you are and when you are,” he notes.
It is worth noting that Ricky’s Mortality is at number one on the Netflix charts.
