Ricky Gervais vs. the Trans Mob

A t some point, every rock band that continues to tour becomes an oldies act. There’s always a new album to promote, but there isn’t always a new album worth listening to. Bands learn that people want to hear the hits.

Ricky Gervais is still funny, but at times in his new Netflix special SuperNature, I had the sense that I was listening to the Eagles rolling out “Lyin’ Eyes” one more time. Did you know that Gervais is an atheist? Well, let him blow your minds with this thought: He doesn’t believe in anything supernatural. He doesn’t mind if someone sends prayers his way should he get cancer, but he’s going to stick with the chemotherapy anyway, thanks very much. Prayers and chemotherapy are fine, because they yield the same result as just chemotherapy. Moreover, he thinks empirically measured and scientifically observed nature is really super. Super. Nature. Get it? Gervais even keeps the title logo of the show projected on a podium to his left, which is a bit cringey. Comics are supposed to be cool. Logos are not cool.

As Maddy Kearns has written, Gervais lobs a few poison darts at transgender orthodoxy near the start of the show, but since he’s been doing this for at least four years, “daring” is not the right adjective here, even if he does make all of the right enemies. Gervais is taking flak from woke critics who insist that some women have penises, but that tells you more about critics than comedy these days. Women don’t have penises. It’s not particularly edgy to make a joke about this, and anyway, Netflix just drove through an Internet storm cycle last year without having to back down, so it seems likely to simply ignore whatever performative whining results from this special.

Gervais does a couple of bits on trans people that are fun but perfectly on-brand. For instance, he mocks those who say biological males should be allowed to use women’s facilities:

They are ladies — look at their pronouns! What about this person isn’t a lady?

Well, his penis.

Her penis, you f***ing bigot!

What if he rapes me?

What if she rapes you, you f***ing TERF whore!

Red-hot material . . . for 2018. But things move quickly in our culture. Gervais frames all of this as risky material, and in certain precincts, it is (notably, at Netflix headquarters, at least among a few activist types who have recently been invited to find another employer if they can’t abide this kind of stuff). But everyone knows Gervais does these sorts of bits, so there’s no surprise factor in SuperNature. I hate to alarm Gervais, of whom I am a fan, but it’s possible that this new hour of standup won’t cause any protests.

Sure, there are chippy little websites accusing the special of being “violently transphobic,” but . . . hands up, all those who care what “The Mary Sue” has to say. This feeble blowback, complete with the dimwit conflation of words with violence, amounts to playing the oldies as well. Gervais has a ready reply to this brainless talking point in the special itself: “People nowadays want you to believe that words are actual violence. Now you laughed at a joke about beating up a disabled toddler. No one got hurt! If I’d actually dragged out a disabled toddler and started beating him up, you wouldn’t laugh, right?”

Right, but . . . that’s pretty obvious. Sometimes Gervais sounds like an earnest high-school teacher trying to explain comedy to the dense. He should give his audience more credit and avoid cringey disclaimers: After a not-great joke about female comics, he informs us why we should not take offense, saying, “That was irony. There’s gonna be a bit of that throughout the show, see if you can spot it. Now that’s when I say something I don’t really mean, for comic effect.” Will this be on the midterm, Mr. Gervais?

As Gervais revisits points he already made in his 2018 Netflix special Humanity, he remains deft and accurate, but now that it’s become something of a cliché to slam trans obsessives and cancel culture, Gervais needs to find a new angle if he doesn’t want to become the Henny Youngman of anti-wokeness.

Gervais would do well to practice some introspection and try more confessional comedy. Instead, he keeps it superficial, with a few digs at his own soft belly and a couple of funny but fleeting references to his wealth that could have been developed into something interesting. Even comics who pride themselves on their candor never talk about what it’s like to have an eight-or-nine-figure net worth, and Gervais must be burying a lot of funny reflections on his lucre simply because he thinks his audience would hate him for it. Still, it’s amusing when he refers to all the cats he has roaming around his, er . . . what’s the word? “Mansion.” He also mock-protests that he is in a small minority — less than one percent! because “I’m a white heterosexual multimillionaire.” He adds, “I’m like Rosa Parks, except I fought for the right to never have to take a seat on a bus.”

Too many of Gervais’s new bits are impersonal or have nothing to do with our moment. There’s a bit on cats and dogs, for instance, and an extended riff mocking fundamentalists discussing AIDS that would have sounded trite 30 years ago. A comment on tolerance leads to the punchline that an Eskimo is “basically a cold Chinaman,” which leads to a David Brent-style joke on how Asians speak.

When Gervais slips into these kinds of digressions — presenting a terribly outdated joke as something we can either laugh at on its own terms for being politically incorrect or laugh at as a sort of lame meta-joke — he dilutes his strongest asset, which is his reputation as a fearless, honest, woke-skeptic truth teller and purveyor of common sense. (If ghosts exist, he asks, why do all of those ghost documentaries never turn up any actual evidence? It’s as though a nature documentary never found any wild animals to film.)

But his stock of common-sense observations is running a bit thin here. Yes, people get fat because we eat and drink too much. But when told he needs more fiber in his diet, he says he replies, “Get me wine with fiber in it, then.” I can picture Dean Martin doing that joke in about 1973. Much sharper is an imaginatively naughty riff about how he imagines a rehab facility for pedophiles might work. “You know how they give heroin addicts methadone? We’re going to start you on dwarfs.” A pornographic fantasy involving baby Hitler is another inventive and original bit.

Still, to remain relevant, Gervais needs to be more responsive to changing times. Quite a lot has happened in the world since 2019, and yet, apart from a quick jab at Boris Johnson and a somewhat tortured bit about how hugging has gone out of style, virtually everything Gervais is saying now could have been said in 2019. And was. By him.