Floating World, Ricky Gervais – You Funny Bastard, You

Ricky Gervais – You Funny Bastard, You

Man: Why don’t you want to go to Africa?

Goat: Umm… lions?

Man: Come on, why don’t you want to Africa?

Goat: Uh… AIDS?

Man: Well that shouldn’t affect you.

Goat: It shouldn’t …

– Ricky Gervais at “A Night of Too Many Stars 2010: Charity for Autism Education”

If there was one comedian that demonstrated the brilliance of British humor, I’d pick Gervais hands down (though Simon Pegg would be a immediate second). The reason?

Ricky Gervais is one devilishly hilarious son of a bitch.

He exudes an uncanny confidence that is remarkable by stand-up comedy standards: calm and almost conversational, he’ll step up onto the stage and in his dry, wry self, sets up the situation with offhanded remarks here and there, with everything funneling down into the final, gut-throttling punch – the kicker.

What’s more remarkable is his widespread appeal to Americans while exhibiting a distinctly British style of humor. There’s no yelling, caricaturizing, hyperbolizing, arm flailing, Dane Cook f-bombing or overzealousness common to much of American-styled humor; instead we’re left with almost a dialogue, in which it’s almost as if it’s one man simply talking, and our reaction (laughter) is the equivalent of a response.

Better to give than receive, right? Especially in prison.

– Gervais at “A Night of Too Many Stars 2010: Charity for Autism Education”

Even more impressive is his daredevil style and boundary pushing quips that, though initially clean-sounding, turn out to be harsher, darker and smarter than what you expect. Nazis? Necrophilia? Bestiality? AIDS? Prison rape? The Bible? Check!

Perhaps the best way to describe Gervais’s style is one of a natural, fearless conversationalist about perhaps some of the most unspectacular and surprising topics possible. There’s no urgency to make the punchline known – it’s common for him to add minute details during his routine, as if he’s enforcing the levity and brevity of what he’s trying to get at – and oftentimes, there are two reactions to Gervais’s kicker: the initial shock and the outrageous thereafter. And this only for one joke – imagine what it’s like to constantly fall in and out of shock and realization with each sentence, each delivery during the British bumpkins comedy gold.

Naturalism is an incredibly difficult feat to pull off; in fact, sometimes it’s just easier to overact, overexert energy to outrageous levels with the sole purpose of shock factor. In this respect, Gervais’s ability to accomplish this feat every time is nothing short of genius. You can see it, too, based off his routines to his penned shows and recent cinematic debuts: The Office UK was all about the unspectacularness of an unspectacular office setting and the unique human qualities that arise from such; Extras focused on actors outside of the spotlight, highlighting the unspectacularness of the filming industry commonly perceived as euphoric by the public; and his two films Ghost Town and The Invention of Lying were all about one unspectacular man suddenly discovering perhaps spectacular, yet still manages to remain unspectacular in his quixotic self.

I told you Winslet – do a Holocaust movie, the awards come, didn’t I?

– Gervais at the 2009 Golden Globe Awards

Ghost Town and The Invention of Lying reveal another unique characteristic of Gervais, which is the man who suddenly discovered he knows something others do not. Many wonder how Gervais can so easily deliver comedy gold one after another; I suspect Gervais himself wonders this on occasion, but simply goes about his life doing so. His comedic timing and abilities are natural to himself and perplexing to the rest of us, and even if he tried to explain to us why or how he did it, what exactly goes through his mind when in the moment he decides to drop a joke about his niece’s puppy dying on Christmas Eve – is it even possible for us to deliver such a line with the same timing and effect? Probably not.

Perhaps Gervais’s only Achille’s ankle is that he may have too much faith in who he’s appealing to and who he works with. This allows him to continue dropping incredibly subtle and smart jokes during his standup, and has allotted him international fame and notoriety for being a master of devilish conversation. The only unfortunate angle of his faith in people’s intelligence is that his comedic and wry writing cannot be delivered to their full potential by some of the American actors and others (outside his circle of Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington) he’s casted and worked with in Ghost Town and The Invention of Lying. Oftentimes, these actors couldn’t quite grasp the sort of subtlety and quick nature of Gervais’s writing style, putting an emphasis on the wrong words and either delivering too slowly or too quickly (more commonly the former); this could be attributed to an inherent difference between American and British styles of humor, the former traditionally being more Broadway-style bombastic and the latter traditionally being more like a ricochetting boomerang that hits you twice in a row (the acting exceptions, of course, would be Tea Leone and Kirsten Wiig in Ghost Town and Jonah Hill in The Invention of Lying).

Mel Gibson… nooo, come on, come on, I’m not going to have a go at him. He’s been through a lot… not as much as the Jews.

– Gervais at the 2010 Emmy Awards

Whatever you may feel about him, there’s no denying that Gervais has the unique, ballsy gift of being subtle in front of a large audience and still getting a good laugh on more than one occasion. And by all means he’s one hilarious son of a bitch who can have you heaving and crying in one second and another.

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