Review of his latest stand-up tour

We know the choreography of this dance now. I’m supposed to call Ricky Gervais out for being cruel and offensive, adding to the woke liberal outcry against him, hence burnishing his credentials as a bold free speech warrior saying what he wants in the face of the censorious left.

But that’s a simplification. There are some good jokes here, even those that cross the line. Especially those that cross the line,  in some cases, provided you take him at face value. 

He’s not fomenting hate – especially now he seems to have, thankfully, given up targeting trans people. He’s just a naughty, 63-year-old multi-millionaire schoolboy sniggering at all the naughty words that teacher, or the twittersphere, wouldn’t like. 

Gervais doesn’t reach very far for off-colour topics to joke about. Jimmy Savile, Anne Frank, Stephen Hawking, Harold Shipman and plenty of paedo gigs. Bread and butter for an army of open-mic hopefuls and a predictable catalogue of names showing he’s just as guilty of groupthink as the keyboard warriors he spends much of the show arguing about.

More contemporaneously, Rosie Jones gets a mention but only because she made a provocative disability documentary with the R-word in the title, and Gervais gets to use it too, if he talks about the show. Funny how the comedian can say this ableist word in full but not the N-word - he only deals in ‘acceptable’ unacceptability.

His comic inspirations might be pretty hack, but it’s hard to get too censorious about it. Accept the amorality of his standpoint and some of the gags are strong, the sort you feel guilty laughing at, but laugh nonetheless as he’s reverse-engineered a way to justify them.

Given how far from being ‘cancelled’ the No1 stand-up on Netflix is, the culture war angle might be artificial, but it gives Mortality a sense of purpose that the much-ignored theme of the title certainly doesn’t. However, the impact is muted by a tendency to over- justify his gags and focus on the reactions he expects to get from his naughtiness rather than just plough on with the jokes. 

Away from this, his observations can be pretty trite. Yes, virtue-signallers - the enemy he can’t get out of his head – are making empty, smug gestures and ADHD does seem to be ubiquitous now as people try to get on what Gervais calls the ‘victimhood ladder’, though he has got quite a neat, if unsympathetic, way of describing the condition. 

He claims Mortality is the ‘most personal and confessional show’ he’s ever done – but quickly adds ‘not in an Edinburgh Fringe way’. He wants to be a man-of-the-people separating himself from the pretentious stereotype of the festival, even though hundreds of Fringe shows are better than this.

Indeed, had you been in Edinburgh eight years ago you might have heard the much less famous Andy Field doing a routine about the Exorcist line ‘your mother sucks cocks in hell’ that’s very similar to the one Gervais is doing now.

 Yet for his claims about opening up, there’s very little that’s personal here, other than reminding us he was working-class before he became monied, with his Hampstead mansion and first-class flights, and a bit of a meditation on ageing.

Even in a relatively short show – about 75 minutes – he runs out of steam. At the end, he recounts trying to get a mischievous gag past the lawyers and into his  Golden Globes monologue, which is a decent chat-show anecdote, but seems a stretch for stand-up, 

And the closer is an absolute damp squib about the football chants Sir Elton John used to endure in the 1980s about his sexuality. But here’s Gervais 40 years later generating cackles – largely his own – out of  ‘backs against the wall’-type jokes. He may be mocking how silly it is, but the laughs essentially come from the same sentiment. It’s childish and dated at worst, low-level homophobia at worst.

Gervais can be better than this. That he chooses not to says a lot.

» Ricky ​Gervais tour dates

Review date: 29 Nov 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Brighton Centre