DVD review by Steve Bennett

Unlikely as it might seem today, there was a point when Ricky Gervais was humble with his stand-up. Appreciating he could fill theatres on the back of his well-deserved Office fame without having earned his stripes the battlefields of the circuit, he seemed genuinely keen to learn to be a better comic.

But that was four DVDs ago. Now he boasts in interviews that he’s the funniest he’s ever been, while getting increasingly lazy in the schoolboy sneering that now passes for material.

No that he has much time for criticism, especially when it focuses on his ‘politically incorrect’ stance. In this show he pictures an army of humourless killjoys tapping away on the internet, whining: ‘You can’t say “mong”.’

Well, ‘mong’ can be an intensely hurtful word, but there’s no reason a comic couldn’t use it if the joke’s funny enough or if there’s a point behind it. But not for Gervais – he just likes saying the word and is far too famous and busy to think WHY he might want to say it. So the routine ends up unfunny, and not even offensive, just pointless.

He supposes the audience know he’s being willfully boorish – but his ignorance is rarely the butt of the joke. Instead he takes cheap shots at the weak, such as a woman in a Ken Dodd concert who seems to have mental health issues. On-stage persona or not, there is something quite nasty about an internationally famous multi-millionaire choosing this as their target – and being rather smug about it to boot. At least Frankie Boyle, morally reprehensible as he is, would have a laser-sharp gag to meet the occasion.

Others who deserve Gervais’s haughty contempt are beggars, nerdy autograph hunters, Susan Boyle, heather-peddling gypsies (for which he recycles a very old joke) and fat people. Again, if the jokes were better he could get away with it, but it’s largely an unpleasant attitude masquerading as comedy.

Of the routines that don’t mock the weak, the most substantial is a deconstruction of the Noah’s Ark myth, which is reasonably funny but even this feels generic, although it is at least a nod to scientific cynicism in a show that plainly has little else to do with its title.

But overall this is a lacklustre offering – and all the more disappointing because you know Gervais is capable of much more than phoning it in like this.

Ricky Gervais Live IV: Science
Recorded at: Hammersmith Apollo
Running time: 79 minutes
Extras: Meet Karl Pilkington II (25 mins); Karl Meets Warwick (Davis, 17 mins); Ricky In New York (10mins with David Letterman and Larry David)
Released by: Universal Pictures, November 22
Price: £19.99. Click here to buy from Amazon for £12.93

Clip of one of the extras:

Published: 24 Nov 2010