Ricky Gervais finds it baffling that mentioning freedom of speech increasingly gets you branded as right-wing. Gervais isn’t on the right. He’s a good old social-democratic progressive Trump hater. But he thinks comedians should be able to joke about anything. Ten minutes ago, this wasn’t controversial. “Freedom of speech shouldn’t even be a political issue,” he says. “Everyone on every side should agree with that. . . . It’s odd that it became politicized.”
On a recent edition of the Daily Beast’s podcast The Last Laugh, Gervais made an appearance to promote his seriocomic Netflix series After Life (the first two seasons are streaming; a third has just been greenlit). The premise of the show is that the Gervais character is liberated to say anything he thinks at all times because he feels he’s lost everything after his wife dies. Freed from convention, the character gets to be extremely rude and resoundingly funny.
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