Ricky Gervais doesn’t care who he offends.
That won’t come as news to anyone who saw him host the 2020 Golden Globes award show, where the comedian used his opening monologue to rip tech juggernaut Apple (with CEO Steve Cook sitting in the audience) for using slave labor. He also repeatedly insulted the room full of Woke Hollywood actors for naked hypocrisy, and later accused them of turning a blind eye to Harvey Weinstein’s predations.
Ten years ago, if someone told Gervais they were offended by something he said, the comedian would have listened and taken time to consider whether he overstepped the line. But now, Gervais says that when he hears someone is offended, his response is to go, “Are you? Good, good, everyone is, so what?”
“People have gone too far,” the comedian said. “It means nothing now to say, ‘I’m offended,’ because everyone is.”
Gervais made comments in two recent radio interviews where he rebuked “Cancel Culture” and gave a nuanced defense of free speech. He also said in those interviews that he did not think his popular sitcom “The Office,” which began 19 years ago, could be made today.
Gervais co-created “The Office” and starred in the original British version before the program was adapted for the U.S. audience.
In an interview with London’s talkRADIO, Gervais said, “There’s this new weird sort of fascism of people thinking they know what you can say and what you can’t.” He said the idea that people want free speech so that they can say awful things is a “trendy myth” that isn’t true. Free speech protects everyone, Gervais said.
“The two catastrophic problems with the term ‘hate speech’ is, one, what constitutes hate speech? Everyone disagrees. There’s no consensus on what hate speech is. And two, who decides? And there’s the real rub because obviously the people who think they want to close down free speech because it’s bad, are the fascists. It’s a really weird, mixed-up idea that these people hide behind a shield of goodness.”
“They don’t realize how corrupt and wrong that is.”
Gervais said that people must not be afraid to say something that might offend someone, because, “someone somewhere will find everything offensive. And as I’ve always said so many times, ‘Just because you’re offended doesn’t mean you’re right.’”
He also pointed out that there’s a tendency right now for people to vilify each other. “If you’re mildly left-wing on Twitter you’re suddenly Trotsky. If you’re mildly conservative you’re Hitler and if you’re centrist and you look at both arguments, you’re a coward and they both hate you.”
In an interview with Times Radio of London, Gervais said that if “The Office” was put out today “It would suffer because people take things literally” and there are outrage mobs who take things out of context.
“People would worry about some of the subjects and some of the jokes, even though they were clearly ironic, and we were laughing at this buffoon being uncomfortable around difference.”
“Offense comes when people mistake the subject of a joke with the actual target, and they’re not necessarily the same,” Gervais said.
A scene from an episode of the American version of “The Office” recently got pulled from streaming services because it contained blackface.
In response to the host asking if he was cancel-proof, Gervais said, “I’m not cancel-proof, I just don’t care. I’m cancel-proof in the sense that I’ve got enough money. If they started taking things back, then I’d worry,” he joked.
More seriously, Gervais argued that he is acting in good faith. “The other thing is, that I genuinely don’t think I do anything that deserves to be canceled. I can justify everything.”
“Some people think freedom of speech means ‘I should be able to say anything without consequences,’ and it doesn’t mean that. We are responsible people. What I say is, ‘I’m saying this thing, and I don’t believe there is anything wrong with it, and I can explain it if you want.’”
“Some people now, they don’t care about the argument or the issue, they just want to own someone, they want to win the argument,” he continued. “There’s no nuance or discussion anymore. It’s just fallen into two tribes of people screaming at each other.”
Gervais currently stars in (and also created) “After Life,” a dark comedy about a man struggling with grief following his wife’s death. The show is available on Netflix.
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