Ricky Gervais: SuperNature review — Tired, lame gatekeeping by white heterosexual multi-millionaire

Language: English The logline of SuperNature, Ricky Gervais’ latest Netflix special outrightly states that among other things, the 60-year-old comedian explains “the rules of comedy” over the course of the one-hour long set. I won’t lie, it made me groan even before I started watching the special. The very prospect of a comedian pontificating about the purpose of a joke — “it’s an act, people!,” Gervais reminds the audience continuously — feels as redundant as an A-lister defending his star-studded, exaggerated movie from critical reviews. Still, Gervais is not one to be deterred; he’s at the stage of his career where he truly believes that he can eat his own cake and remind everyone else that they’re actually paying for it too.   In many ways, that disclaimer is a telling sign of the stilted ambitions of SuperNature, which like many recent stand-up acts insists on acknowledging the lines between comedy and reality, and then demands a pat on the back for blurring it. Gervais too puts his hat in the ring of this endless cycle of self-referential comedy wars instigated, continued, and reiterated by men, who have somehow started believing that a comedy special is the same as outlining the very nature of comedy. I don’t mean to sound disillusioned but there really has to be more to comedy than wealthy, overgrown men defending each other’s freedom to offend while also being terribly unfunny.   Sure, comedy is subjective — what anyone finds funny or offensive can never be universal — but here’s the thing that Gervais forgets: laughter is a fact. Any comedian’s ability to earn laughs from their audience is a universal proof of their craft. Again, it’s telling that in SuperNature, Gervais chooses to treat laughter as a weapon — even when he elicits laughs from his audience, he rarely earns them. In that, the special almost uses the fact that Gervais can make his audience laugh — whether by undue manipulation or unnecessary provocation — as a proof of its relevance. Except, it’s easy to see through it given that this is easily the comedian’s least amusing act in recent memory. “Everything is a syndrome, or an addiction, or a preference,” Gervais complains in the opening minutes of SuperNature. The lengthy monologue heads exactly in the direction any sane person might think it’s heading: the terror of political correctness. To illustrate his fears, Gervais touches upon the male-dominated landscape of comedy by claiming that funny women are invisible, drops a Louis C.K masturbation joke before moving on to an unfunny bit about gender-affirmation surgery, and then settling on the debate over whether trans women should be able to choose the washrooms they use. The usual buzzwords (“cancelled,” “woke comedy,” “identity politics,” “minorities”) are smugly glossed over as if the eventual goal of the special is to rile people up just so that Gervais can prove his point.  

The essence of the one-hour set can be distilled down to one thing: the comedian’s unfettered glee about being able to say things deemed irresponsible (or even insensitive) by the moral demands of our current society.

This nature of taboo comedy (SuperNature is stacked with jokes on the comedian’s favorite topics: sexual assault, paedophilia, dead babies, atheism) is classic Gervais, whether he is writing a comedy show or hosting an award ceremony. Even in SuperNature, the joke lies in the sheer audacity of crossing lines, a gag that gets less and less imaginative as the years go by.   In that sense, it’s altogether easy to describe the special as a provocation just on account of Gervais insisting on shouldering a new season of culture wars but I’d argue any provocation is ultimately rooted in invention. Artists provoke when they challenge existing social preoccupations and not merely acknowledge them. In SuperNature, Gervais does nothing more than lazily proclaim that stand-up comedy as an art-form should exist at a far remove from societal mores. It’s the kind of gatekeeping by a middle-aged man that isn’t just tired but something that is solely designed for an extreme reaction. If comedy is about locating a language of emotional truth in laughter, then Gervais certainly doesn’t get the memo.   It also doesn’t help that the rest of the special is haphazardly constructed: there’s some language on animals, the supernatural, and nature but most of it is as unmemorable as elevator music. The only time Gervais had my attention was when he admitted that as a comedian, he will take any position if it serves his joke, whether that means pretending to be a liberal or being aligned to the right-wing for example. The sincerity rankled me and I wished there was more of that for it indicted a society’s collective inability to distinguish between art and artist more effectively and economically than the one hour that Gervais spent “ironically” underlining the distinction. The sheer mediocrity of SuperNature would be easy to get over if this was a special by a comedian in a nascent stage of their careers. Gervais on the other hand, has no excuse for being this boring.   “Please welcome to the stage a man who really doesn’t need to do this,” the comedian says over a black screen introducing his special. By the end of SuperNature, it made me wish that Gervais who proudly identifies as a white heterosexual multi-millionaire stuck to his own words. Ricky Gervais: SuperNature is streaming on Netflix

Poulomi Das is a film and culture writer, critic, and programmer. Follow more of her writing on  Twitter. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.