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The World Is Evolving

and Ricky Gervais Isn’t
By Lindy West

March 28, 2018

Ricky Gervais, the British comedian, does not care what you say about him on
Twitter. He does not care if you are offended. He does not care if you hate the
latest joke he told about rape, or the Bible, or Caitlyn Jenner, or Hitler or your
child’s fatal peanut allergy. And just to make sure you’re crystal clear on all of
the tweets he does not remotely care about, he has built his new Netflix stand-up
special, “Ricky Gervais: Humanity,” around them — these negligible tweets, the
droning of gnats, several years of which he appears to have accidentally screen-
grabbed and saved to his phone. (Ricky Gervais: Butterfingers!)

Similarly, I don’t care about Formula One racing, which is why I’m working on a
tight 75-minute act about the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

Gervais seems to care quite intensely, of course, which is natural. It would be

grotesque, inhuman, not to care. Absorbing critique on a scale as vast as
Gervais’s Twitter feed (13.1 million followers), whether the specific critiques are
warranted or not, is objectively grueling. Stand-up comedy is vulnerable and
hard. Twitter is awful. Devoid of context, Gervais’s bravado might be
sympathetic, a relatable if tedious coping mechanism. As Gervais himself
helpfully points out in “Humanity,” however, nothing can truly be divorced from
context.

So here’s some context for you: Last week, the secretary of housing and urban
development, Ben Carson, testified in front of a House subcommittee that trans

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women in homeless shelters make cisgender women “not comfortable.”

According to a 2016 survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality, 20
percent of trans people report having been homeless at some point because of
their gender identity, 55 percent report being harassed by homeless shelter
residents and staff, and 29 percent have been turned away from shelters for
being trans. Meanwhile, on Netflix, Gervais graphically speculated about Caitlyn
Jenner’s gender confirmation surgery, repeatedly referred to her as a big strong
man, relentlessly called her by her pre-transition name and compared gender
dysphoria to a human choosing to identify as a chimpanzee.

That is the context within which Gervais insists he doesn’t care about critiques
of his work — critiques pointing out that describing trans women as goofy,
freaky, delusional men who’ve just “popped on a dress” isn’t edgy or cheeky, it’s
dangerous. Giggling at the “weirdness” of trans people — presenting your
spasms of discomfort as something relatable — makes it harder for trans people
to find a safe place to sleep. Transphobia is not a pet issue of the hypersensitive
but a continuing international emergency.

And sure, some critiques are silly or bad. Public opinion is a numbers game:
Distribute your work to a large enough sample and you’ll accrue people who love
you, which is intoxicating, but also people who don’t, which is painful. You’ll find
some who get the jokes but hate them anyway and some who hate you without
even bothering to watch. This doesn’t actually say much about humanity except
that it is vast and varied. Yet, out of this data set, some comedians and their fans
seem determined to gerrymander an epidemic of bowdlerization.

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“People see something they don’t like and they expect it to stop,” Gervais says in
“Humanity.” “The world is getting worse. Don’t get me wrong, I think I’ve lived
through the best 50 years of humanity. 1960 through 2015, the peak of civilization
for everything. For tolerances, for freedoms, for communication, for medicine!

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And now it’s going the other way a little bit.”

“Dumpster fire” has emerged as the favorite emblem of our present moment, but
that Gervais quote feels both more apt and more tragic a metaphor: The
Trump/Brexit era is a rich, famous, white, middle-aged man declaring the world
to be in decline the moment he stops understanding it.

Gervais is not alone in presenting himself as a noble bulwark against a wave of

supposed left-wing censorship. (A Netflix special, for the record, is not what
“silencing” looks like.) We’ve heard similar sentiments from hand-wringers
across the political spectrum who insist that overzealous, “politically correct”
college activists are strangling academia. We’ve heard it from pundits and
politicians who insist that white men were so victimized by the “sensitivity” of
marginalized people, they had no choice but to vote for Donald Trump. Men who
scream “snowflake” at rape victims feel so wounded by even minor critiques that
they have been re-litigating the same arguments about “offense” and “free
speech” for decades.

What they’re actually reacting to is the message deep at the heart of the March
for Our Lives, of Black Lives Matter, of the Women’s March: The world is bigger
than you, and it belongs to us too.

If you’ve spent any time with Gervais’s work beyond “The Office” and “Extras,”
you know that the man is obsessed with evolution. His 2003 stand-up special was
about animals; his 2010 special was called “Science”; in 2009 and 2010 he
released special episodes of his podcast, The Ricky Gervais Show, devoted to
natural history, the human body, the earth.

On their Xfm radio show in the early 2000s, Gervais and his co-host, Stephen
Merchant, did a recurring segment called “Do We Need ’Em?” in which the
producer, Karl Pilkington, chose an animal he found strange or useless (jellyfish,
for instance) and interviewed a scientist about whether or not we should “keep”
them.

“What are they adding to the world?” he once asked Gervais and Merchant

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about giraffes. “What are they doing?”

Gervais explained that species aren’t here because they add something to the
world. They weren’t chosen by a benevolent creator; they aren’t the most
beautiful or the strongest or the most beneficial to the whole. They just didn’t die.
They survived to pass on their genetic material, and that’s it. That’s evolution.
The world thunders on, with or without you. Adapt or perish.

It’s baffling that Gervais can have so much reverence for physical evolution and
so little for intellectual evolution. He might find trans people silly, but you know
who doesn’t? Teenagers. I remember the first gay kiss on TV, and I am only 36
years old; my kids think I must be lying. My husband, a stand-up comic, used to
do a bit about a Comcast commercial in which a woman goes on a date with a
little green alien; at the time, interracial human couples were taboo in
advertising. That joke doesn’t work anymore, because the world changed, and
it’s going to keep changing.

It is frightening, I assume, when you are accustomed to being not just a voice of
authority in your field but the archetype of authority in your civilization, to be
challenged and feel those challenges stick.

I’m being hard on Ricky Gervais not because his attitude is extraordinary but
because it is common. Not because I think he and the other ostensibly left-
leaning men who succumb to this trap are just like Trump, but because I believe
they aren’t. Or they don’t have to be.

You can choose to be permeable, to be curious, to be the one that didn’t die.

Lindy West is the author of “Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman” and a contributing opinion writer.

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