Ricky Gervais Reveals He’s In DANGER After Exposing Hollywood.
Ricky Gervais’s Armageddon is a tiresome cocktail of neediness and tastelessness.
The comedian’s apparent desire to be liked sits awkwardly with material that too often takes easy shortcuts to a dark laugh
NB. This is a review of the Manchester leg of Ricky Gervais’s Armageddon tour, from December 2022
Ricky Gervais has an air of neediness: you sense he wants, desperately, to be liked. In the right role it’s a brilliant asset; it gave a tragic edge to David Brent’s wheedling in The Office, and Andy’s social-climbing in Extras. But Gervais is in the wrong role in his polished but hollow stand-up, miscasting himself as a bad-taste provocateur.
Not that he has anything especially interesting to say about either; “cripple” and “nonce” are just easy shortcuts to a dark laugh. Like mentioning rape, dead babies or Aids – or raped babies, or dead babies with Aids. Gervais’s imagination circles around a very small pool of tropes. As in previous shows, he imagines how God designed genitals, mocks prayer’s medical inefficacy, mimes masturbating and namedrops Hitler, with little flair for phrasing, and largely unvaried delivery.
