Summary
Ricky Gervais is sometimes in throwback form in Mortality, but the temptation to point out the usual too-obvious absurdities proves overwhelming.
It takes an effort to remember this now, but Ricky Gervais used to be a very good comedian. For a while, he was probably my favourite working comedian in the world. He had the demeanour of a normal working-class bloke who had sneaked into the mainstream and was redecorating the walls without anyone really noticing what he was up to. He was anti-celebrity, anti-pretension, anti-stupidity. He understood irony. These things are probably all still true, but the really ironic thing is that the Gervais who made a great special like Politics would have probably hated his latest Netflix effort, Mortality.
But it’s too easy these days. The unavoidable truth about Gervais’s latest work, which was also true about Armageddon, is that he’s right. We know he’s right. He knows he’s right. There is nothing more eminently mockable than virtue-signalling always-online faux-liberalism, but bringing up the most obviously ridiculous examples of it for an hour doesn’t necessarily constitute an act. And that’s the only act Gervais has had for years: “I’m rich, I’m getting on a bit, so I’m annoyed, and cancel culture is silly.”
You’ll notice these are the essential ideas threaded through his narrative work as well. After Life was a lovely show in a lot of respects, but it was also unavoidably Gervais moaning about all the things that annoy him personally, usually in his own voice with very little artistic artifice. It was indulgent. It was never a great secret that Stephen Merchant was the better writer of the partnership that brought us the best British sitcom of all time – a hill I’ll happily die on – but it has become more obvious as Gervais has become older and more successful. He even mentions it himself early on in Mortality that all the bitching and moaning about what he’s saying is what’s currently keeping him astronomically popular.
With all this, you can sort of see why all these specials are starting to feel the same. The woke crowd is the easiest to upset, you’re guaranteed to do well if you pull it off, and Gervais is of an age now where he just wants to moan about things that annoy him. You could slip that .gif of David Brent slotting his fingers together while biting his lip here, and it’d work quite nicely. Gervais’s success has allowed him to be the naughty schoolboy he once was well into his 60s. Why change now? Claims that this is his most “personal and confessional” special don’t really hold much water in this light, but whatever. You can’t have everything.
The formula is what it is, then. Gervais brings up really obviously stupid and contradictory examples of virtue signalling, does the old man bits about people being noisy on planes or clearing their throats in restaurants, repurposes chat show anecdotes and some of Karl Pilkington’s old theories from the podcast, introduces an “offensive” word or concept then reverse-engineers a way to make it acceptable to say, and occasionally goes off on absurdist tangents – there’s a decent one about an infamous line from The Exorcist – that call back to some of the better bits from earlier specials.
And that’s important to note. Mortality is better than Armageddon and SuperNature by a margin, even though it’s more of the same, because the anti-woke stuff is a bit less trendy, there’s no baiting mention of trans people whatsoever – a habit that even all-time-great comedians like Dave Chappelle can’t seem to shake off – and the space that low-hanging fruit would usually occupy has to be filled with something else. Gervais is still really good at seeing the absurdity in things; at introducing a quintessentially heinous person or idea and finding the funny side. Sure, there’s a predictability to his choice of taboos – Anne Frank, Jimmy Saville, Harold Shipman, Stephen Hawking, the Devil – that undermines the idea he’s pushing any comedic boundaries, but he’s still pretty good at pushing the usual buttons.
Don’t be offended. Honestly, he doesn’t mean it. And you can tell, because he isn’t quite brave enough to fully commit to anything that might legitimately offend people in a meaningful way. It leads to a tendency to sometimes over-explain and over-justify, as if reassuring the audience that the jokes are coming from a good, safe place, but it’s also a reminder that offending people who are already offended by everything is too easy and is a waste of a comedian like Gervais’s time. There are flashes in Mortality of the once-great comic who didn’t need a crutch, but the temptation to keep returning to well ultimately proves too strong.
