'Armageddon': Why you should pray for Ricky Gervais

For anyone who failed to notice that Ricky Gervais released his new special on Christmas day, he was happy to point it out: “For the next 2,000 years, people will remember the 25^th of December as the day ‘Armageddon’ was released on Netflix.”

We’ve come to expect such gleeful blasphemy from Mr. Gervais. Some viewers are bored by it. As a Christian, I say we pray for him.

Let us pray that he remain steadfast in his crusade against comedy’s greatest enemy: people who can’t take a joke.

“Armageddon” may not be new ground for Gervais, but so what? Novelty for novelty’s sake is how you get “Nanette.” If you’re looking for a sportive jaunt through a zeitgeist in upheaval, Gervais more than delivers.

“Armageddon” also answers the question, “What would it sound like if nihilist philosopher Emil Ciorin tried stand up?” While nothing here approaches the sheer existential despair induced by watching John Oliver, fans of classic Ciorin zingers like “it is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late” (“The Trouble with Being Born”) will find much to enjoy.

I give “Armageddon” a solid 8 out of 10. I’m tempted to rate it even higher, based on the closing monologue alone and for Gervais’ unerring ability to infuriate the usual nagging gargoyles keeping watch over our entertainment choices.

Who are we, after all, to have fun, to laugh, to read this article, while third-world slaves and first-world gentry whimper in agony under the weight of free-market climate change?

My purpose here is not to defend Gervais, who is vegan and therefore indefensible. But rather to push back against the drooling scolds who believe that enjoying his comedy is a bigoted indulgence.

Thankfully, Gervais loves comedic duplicity. It might even be the hallmark of his entire career.

Comedians should be — must be — slippery as hell. The moment audiences can predict what they’ll say, they’ve failed.

Gervais is a master of this furtive dance. His pacing, his delivery; you never know when he’ll dart sideways.

In “Armageddon,” he fully embraces this persona, the jester who says “oops” with a smile because a smile makes disaster confusing.

Gervais dunks on immigrants, science-deniers, cultural-appropriation-accusers, statue-topplers, and critical race theory zealots. He does not spare "Time Person of the Year” Taylor Swift. Chinese pedophiles? He roasts them too: “A Chinese pedophile walks up to a kid and says, ‘Do you want a puppy?’ The kid responds, ‘I’m not hungry.’”

Gervais has been “punching down” like this for almost 20 years. His 2004 special “Live 2: Politics” opens with a sketch in which he gleefully berates a disabled Egyptian man, forcing him to wear a fez, calling him gay, then stealing his wheelchair.

Laughter-hating activists took the bait then, and they’re still taking it. So why shouldn’t Gervais give them what they want? He starts “Armageddon” by announcing that, in light of the backlash to last year’s “SuperNature,” he has “decided to be woke.”

Minutes later, the newly-woke Gervais imagines a conversation with a Make-A-Wish kid whom he calls “baldy” and asks, "Why didn’t you wish to get better? What, are you f***ing retarded as well?”

The premise-to-punchline is almost too easy, but who cares? Or, rather, the actual joke is that the usual hair-trigger activists have demanded that you care. Predictably, they were so outraged by Gervais’ use of the R-word that they started a Change.org petition to have it cut from the special.

But the true accomplishment of “Armageddon” is that an atheist vegan would be capable of humor to begin with. Amen.

Slippery slope

Halfway through “Armageddon,” Gervais seems ready to break character for the sake of politics: “I should do political stuff now that I’m woke,” he says, “but I don’t like it when a comedian just spouts his own political views, and it relies on the audience agreeing with him to get a round of applause. I think that loses comedically.”

The audience agrees, but not with clapping.

He adds: “I want everyone to like my jokes, whatever your political persuasion. A joke shouldn’t have a political wing, you know. I’m political in my private life, like everyone, you know. I’m sometimes incensed by the inequalities in our society.”

The audience gets even quieter. Is Ricky Gervais about to flash his voting card?

“There’s 250,000 homeless people in Britain. Now, I wish there were no homeless people, ’cause they’re f***ing horrible.”

Laughter.

Later, he tells a joke about a child slave laborer who does shoddy work: “His owner should sit him down, right, and say, ‘If Ricky Gervais orders these and complains, I’m gonna rape your mummy again.’”

When the audience recoils in “too far,” Gervais earnestly raises his hands, like a surgeon who snipped the wrong tendon, then shuffles to the podium for a drink and announces, “You’ll realize this is great satire when I’m dead.”

On a serious note ...

The claim that Gervais is merely offensive is itself offensive.

It denies the intricate, mischievous play of Gervais’s style, the skill with which he uses seemingly haphazard juxtapositions to force us to admit uncomfortable truths.

If this still doesn’t sound impressive, allow me to invoke Freud, who defined joking as “the ability to find similarity between dissimilar things — that is, hidden similarities.”

The characters Gervais plays — in productions ranging from “The Office” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” to “Paws of Fury” — are uniquely gifted at inspiring that combination of delight and dread that only the finest cringe comedy delivers.

While watching the successful, confident Gervais work an adoring crowd is miles removed from the unbearable spectacle of David Brent’s “chilled-out entertainer” persona, “Armageddon” risks enough that catastrophic embarrassment always looms. Gervais’ brand of infinitely-recursive meta-comedy is nonstop.

In “Armageddon,” he has a joke about African babies with AIDS. Critics have reduced the joke to this: its offensive exterior, its premise.

In reality, it’s a joke about the possibilities of joking, where the fictional subjects are aware of not just their participation in the joke, but also the limits of their fictional reality.

This fabrication, in turn, is meant to challenge the absurd notion that an offensive joke is cause for alarm.

The activist class

One reviewer harrumphed: “Rather than being ‘great satire’, 'Armageddon' is just another piece of lazy comedy that plays on the majority’s fear of minority voices.”

Fear of minority voices? What does that mean? Who are these minority voices? Why is the majority afraid of them? Is the majority afraid of them? What are the consequences of this fear?

The Guardian suggested that “Armageddon” could have succeeded if Gervais had been “curious and engaged rather than macho and smug.”

“Curious and engaged”? The Ted Talk is next door, sir. Only someone raised in a commune of lesbian separatists could find the pudgy, hyena-laughing Gervais overbearingly “macho.” As for “smug,” well, yes. And Jerry Seinfeld sure makes a lot of trivial observations.

The review ends in exemplary “I’m not mad, I’m actually laughing” fashion: “Might I suggest simply writing better [jokes]?”

Animals of the world, unite!

But the most powerful — and by far most revealing — moment of the special comes after Gervais’ final joke, capping an hour of ruthless eviscerations that all but invite Armageddon to cleanse the earth with fire.

Instead of trotting offstage, he lingers. He thanks the audience, sincerely.

It’s his clever way of reminding us that Ricky Gervais, comedian, is not the same as Ricky Gervais, man.

Gervais the comedian jokes about dead dogs and dying goldfish. Gervais the man reveals that a hefty portion of that night’s ticket sales go to an animal charity.

Suddenly, his asides about climate change make sense. The end of the world Gervais invokes is bigger than us. It would mark the end of billions of years of evolution for all life on the planet.

From this larger perspective, the differences of opinion and race and religion that divide us no longer seem so serious. Here we glimpse the reason for Gervais’ equal-opportunity offender routine. Better to hold our grievances up to the light than to let them fester and mutate into the bleak hysteria contaminating much of modern society.

Our wisest fool may be on to something here.