Someone has spent too much time online

“If I came to your house and shouted this stuff through your letterbox, the police would come,” says Ricky Gervais about two-thirds of the way through his final show. “But you all paid to be here.”

It gets a cheer. The public is after the police call material, and Gervais does not disappoint. His enemy is the virtue signaler on social media, and he rejoices in their downfall. He remembers a documentary by Rosie Jones, a British comedian with cerebral palsy, about online abuse of disabled people. She called it Am I a Retard?, referring to the most common slur leveled at her.

Disability campaigners complained, he explains, because as a physically disabled person they were not allowed to use the word. “They said you’re not retarded, you’re spastic,” he twinkles. He didn’t use the word himself, he emphasizes, but he was talking about it. And as a staunch supporter of freedom of expression, context is everything.

A routine about a law in Pakistan that only allows sex after a girl has had her first period illustrates this. It ends with a mother telling a frustrated neighbor that while she waits for her daughter to grow up, she should spend time throwing homosexuals off the roof. “Liberals hate religious fascism and girl abuse, unless it is in Pakistan,” he concludes.

He is an advocate of freedom of expression, but it is not without reason that he also has a career. Gervais starts the show with a reference to his previous tour, Armageddon, which dropped on Netflix on Christmas Day 2023. The show before that, SuperNature, had infuriated virtue signalers with transgender jokes. They tweeted, it trended, the show went to number 1.

“They were just going to do it again,” he grins. Armageddon’s jokes about cancer patients set social media on fire and he became number one again. That’s why he wants to express outrage in the first fifteen minutes. And so immigrants, disabled people and pro-Palestinian activists are taking a beating. Finally, he settles into his theme: growing older and death.

It’s a light-hearted theme. According to him, hell was invented because we hate that bad people get away with it. And then he makes the joke that he’s sure will get canceled. We hate Jimmy Savile because he got away with it, he believes, but what did he get away with? Raping disabled children? If it were offered, Gervais would decline. “Which, in a way, makes me worse than him,” he muses. “At least he gave them a chance.”

You can see where he’s going with this and inevitably these lines look crueler on the page or on social media than when they come from his mischievous lips. But it feels like a guy who used to be the funniest guy in the pub, delivering material written after spending too much time online.

Inbetweeners star Simon Bird recently said The Office changed his life in the way a great album or astonishing novel could. Ricky Gervais wrote The Office, and he also wrote this middle hour of stand-up with a few killer, outrageous lines at the top.

It will make people angry. It becomes number 1 on Netflix. He’ll do it again next year. It won’t change anyone’s life.