“Isn’t there someone in his camp who can tell him these jokes are half-baked? Maybe his one-time “Office” collaborator Stephen Merchant could give him some tough love?”
In a review of the live show that the Armageddon special was filmed around, The Telegraph said: “Gervais is competent enough – I chuckled once or twice – but there’s nothing to surprise anyone here.
“If you want bad-taste one-liners, Jerry Sadowitz beats him on quality and Jimmy Carr on quantity. If you want philosophical, provocative comedy that mocks social pieties and says the supposedly unsayable, try Garrett Millerick, Alfie Brown, or Fin Taylor. Gervais is trapped between two ill-fitting styles, and outclassed in both directions.”
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“The shame is that there’s ample room in comedy to tease at woke over-earnestness and the contradictions of modern political correctness,” The Guardian’s critic said.
“With his jokes about the overuse of the word ‘fascist’, say, or a devious one about so-called cultural appropriation, Gervais shows how good he could be if Armageddon’s spirit were curious and engaged rather than macho and smug. He promises, tongue firmly in cheek, to find a justification for the worst jokes here before taping for Netflix. Might I suggest simply writing better ones?”
Gervais defended the uproar over his “Make-a-Wish” joke earlier in December, claiming that people weren’t “really offended” by it.
“I’m literally saying in the joke that I don’t do that. But people have a reaction. They don’t analyse it,” he said in an interview on BBC Radio 5 Live.
“They feel something – that’s what offence is. It’s a feeling. That’s why ‘I’m offended’ is quite meaningless. What do you want me to change?”
The comedian added that he believes that “99 per cent” of the reaction was “faux offence”.
“They’re not really offended. They just want to be heard,” he said.
“Of all the millions of people that watched it and loved it, only a few don’t like it. If I give them special attention and try and placate them, I’ve annoyed the other millions of people that got the joke. They go, ‘No, you’ve ruined it for us!’”
He continued: “I’ve got a duty to the people that like it and get it. I wouldn’t sit down with a heckler would I? If I’m playing to 20,000 people, I wouldn’t stop the show and explain to them. I ignore them.”