Ricky Gervais is swinging at thin air

At the start of Mortality, his latest Netflix comedy special, Ricky Gervais lets slip a statement that has lodged in my brain with greater force than any of the jokes that follow. “We’ve got free speech, in theory, in this country,” he tells the crowd at the London Palladium, before adding, ominously, “for a little while longer”.

Listening to these peculiarly persecuted words, appropriately enough, my own response was of a style and thoughtfulness consistent with much of the material featured in the hour-long show. “Have a day off, Ricky,” I thought. “Don’t be a prick all your life.”

After making a career and a fortune throwing haymakers from various directions – uppercuts at an audience of the truly famous at the Golden Globes; accusations of punching down in a routine about transgenderism – in Mortality Gervais has reached the point where he’s swinging at thin air. Free speech is under threat in Britain, is it? Righto. And who should I ask about that? Lucy Connelly?

Much less a disquisition about death, what we have here is little more than a battle against targets made of straw. What points there are to be made – about privileged types “telling working class people what they can and can’t do or say,” for example – are frittered carelessly away. “We pushed back [against the scolds] and we won so fuck ‘em,” is about all he has to say on the matter. Obviously, the topic deserves better.

As a man who surely knows that his words have the power to spark discussion across continents, Gervais’s failure to mention the threat posed by the United States government to the liberty of fellow free-speaking funnymen Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert – on whose shows he has appeared – is a curious omission. It speaks of solipsism and selfishness. It might even carry a whisper of cowardice.

Then again, maybe it’s unreasonable to suspect Ricky Gervais of cynically targeting toothless aunt sallies – those “educated, middle-class, privileged, elitist sort of people” – rather than autocrats and martinets who might do him real harm. Perhaps isn’t safeguarding his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame or those lucrative dates at the Hollywood Bowl.

It might just be that the freedom of speech he so strenuously exalts amounts to nothing more than bragging that “I could stand here and say ‘Ghandi used to take it up the arse’, if I wanted – which I do”.

Either way, it’s some distance from the verve and panache with which Gervais once hunted down serious and sensitive. The look of paralysis and panic on the face of David Brent as he tries to determine whether a joke told by Chris Finch about Winnie Mandela is racist, for example, or the subtlety and kindness with which he portrayed the elderly, the remedial, and the overlooked and underpaid in the widely undervalued series Derek.

By comparison, the dislikable kvetching of Mortality suggests something written on the hoof by a man who’s spent months locked in a room with a television that shows only GB News. It’s tedious stuff. With his fixation on cancel culture and liberal elites, the degree to which Ricky Gervais sounds like Ricky Tice with a marginally hipper rap is startling.

“When did people start bragging about having a disorder?” is his predictably reactionary take on Britain’s supposed obsession with mental wellbeing. “I’m pretty sure I’m not autistic because, once, someone gave me a Rubik’s Cube and I put it straight in the fucking bin,” is the bewildering and unfunny sting in the tail. Anyone wondering about the overall strength of the material in Mortality might care to note: that gag appears in the trailer.

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Like Lenny Bruce with a black Amex, the trouble is that Ricky Gervais wants things every which way. He identifies with the working class while feeling the need to tell his audience that his seat on a recent flight to San Francisco was of course in first class. He unpins hand grenades and then gets the hump when people take offence. In a grandly irritating conceit, he even refers to his partner by only her first name, without context of any kind, as if you and I should know who she is.

The gravest sin, though, is an evident lack of contact with the wider world around him. “People say things like, ‘Oh, I’m anti racist’,” he says at one point, sounding for all the world like a man who has gone years without even thinking of kicking the tires of his own good fortune. “Yeah, well done, we all are,” he adds, mockingly. “We know that’s the way to be now.”

Increasingly, of course, this is simply untrue. As he should well know, from the frozen streets of Minneapolis to the Palace of Westminster, racism is back on the scene in a big way. Conversely, in 2025, it’s Ricky Gervais who sounds out of touch and out of time.