Ricky Gervais and the Alchemy of Stand-up.

I'm a Ricky Gervais fan. I enjoyed The Office and Extras. I thought The Invention of Lying was a creative, interesting film. I really enjoyed his recent special, Out of England 2, which I have a short section from above. I'm just not sure I find him funny.

That probably seems strange. I felt similarly when I was recently re-watching some old George Carlin specials. I enjoyed his wordplay bits and his thoughts about the English language and thought those were just as funny, but his material on social topics just sort of made me nod and chuckle, not laugh, even though I agreed with him 90% of the time.

Any comedian will tell you that they're in it for the laughs. The money is great if you're successful, but if they're a dyed-in-the-wool comic, they need to hear someone laughing at least once a month or the world becomes a little unbearable. It's a fairly harmless addiction, unless you just plain stop being funny.

Another problem is that not everybody finds the same things funny. Some people still love Robin Williams. And, yes, he was very entertaining once. But I've just plain stopped finding him funny. Doesn't mean I don't like him in a movie once in a while. I thought he was super in World's Greatest Dad. But that was a very, very dark little movie and not the sort of comedy that he's best known for. The sort of thing you expect from him is that Old Dogs movie he did recently with John Travolta. Maybe you liked it, but the trailer just made me cringe.



Plenty of really funny people have made terrible films. Other than his concert films and two of his efforts with Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor didn't really have a good movie career. Gene Wilder is another example of someone who made a handful of really great, funny movies, and a lot of not-so-great ones.

Now, someone reading this might protest... they might say that The Toy or Funny About Love is the funniest film they've ever seen. And that's valid, I guess; comedy is a subjective thing. Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks are usually mentioned as being two of the most daring, controversial stand-up comedians there who ever lived. But neither of them, in their lifetimes, managed to get further than the fringe. They never managed to break through. Meanwhile, Pryor and Carlin, who certainly had material that was dark, challenging, profane, blasphemous... you name it, really... both had bigger careers. Maybe part of that had to do with Bruce and Hicks dying young, but I can't imagine Lenny Bruce showing up in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, can you? I can't see Bill Hicks managing to get hired onto Superman III, either, now that I think of it. Pryor and Carlin were more than funny... they were charismatic, likable performers. George Carlin might have insulted your beliefs, but it was hard to dislike him. Richard Pryor might have called you out on your tacit racism, but there was no denying that he was a magnetic personality.

Which brings me back to Ricky Gervais. He's got this strange charm that makes you sort of move toward him and pull away at the same time. So much of The Office was about this sort of deep social awkwardness and it was his talent to be repulsive, yet interesting. But I'm still not sure if I found it funny. It was very compelling, interesting stuff, and I laughed at the awkwardness of it all, the weird shame and sadness I had for the characters, and it was certainly comedy. The bit I posted above about the comparison people made about fatness and gayness certainly made me laugh, but I'm not sure that it was actually funny to me. And I know it's a weird distinction.

I think the word I'm looking for is humorous. I find that, if I'm talking to or listening to someone I find intelligent and they tell me something that I agree with and laugh at, I am appreciating their sense of humor, but that's not necessarily something I'd use the word funny to describe. And I think that's the distinction you can make with Ricky Gervais; you have to jive with his sense of humor in order to find him entertaining. If you are a very devout religious person, you're not going to find a lot you can like about Gervais' act; a significant portion of what it's about are things that people believe in very deeply and hold sacred. George Carlin did it later in his career but, perhaps because he was a lapsed Catholic who had done so much material about that upbringing, and because we understand lapsed Catholicism better in our society, and because he even stopped short of atheism in his act on a number of occasions, somehow that was more palatable. In the case of Carlin, it was a gentle progression from one end to the other that went from relatively gentle fun about priests and nuns, to open ridicule of the materialism and hypocrisy of organized religion, to an eventual rejection of a deity (Carlin claimed in one act that he worshiped a giant, uncaring electron and, in another, said that he prayed to Joe Pesci). This was a gentle evolution that went over four decades of work.

With Gervais, it's full-stop. He's an atheist, makes no bones about it, and claims that he hasn't believed in God since he was eight years old. In interviews, he makes the distinction that he sees no harm in people believing in God, so long as they don't believe to the point that they exclude reason entirely. But in his act, the concept of God is on the defense. Is this why I don't find him funny? No, but it's important to understand the part that reason plays in his act.

Now, he does make some concessions to the sensibilities of his audience. This most recent act deals, in part, with the story of Noah's Ark and the parts of the story which defy reason, and the version of the story he tells comes from a children's book with primitive illustrations. Comedians have done this one before. Bill Cosby made his career on the Noah routines. ("What's a cubit?") Gervais isn't on terribly shaky ground here; since many (though not all) modern people of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic faith consider the story of Noah to be largely allegorical, this isn't as dangerous as, say, a routine about the crucifixion or the prophet Muhammad, but Gervais is relentless in his reason and that might be off-putting, even to fellow atheists.

Take this assault of reason in the form of another of his routines, in which he deals bluntly with fat people and his own recent weight loss. The big idea, as Gervais puts it, is that you avoid being fat by taking in fewer calories than you burn. He wanders into gags about fat people needing special supermarkets where sweets and fatty foods are behind a door they can't fit through. I agree with him completely and find it all very humorous and entertaining, but it isn't funny to me. And, no, it's not because I'm fat.

One thing that Ricky Gervais hasn't really managed to do is figure out how to work with a thesis. George Carlin knew how to form a thesis. George Carlin had two really powerful, really clever comic theses. 1) We say such strange things in our language. 2) Profanity is a valuable and misunderstood part of our language. He expanded and contracted those ideas, adapted them to different situations and essentially took you through those ideas with examples.

In the place of a thesis, Ricky Gervais just has blunt reason. He makes humorous comments about things, but it gets a little toothless. Fat people are fat because they eat too much. Religious people believe in fairly preposterous things. His routines are rarely about himself, but rather things that he finds irritating or irrational in others. The one joke he does tell on himself is that he's actually rather selfish and enjoys being wealthy. For the most part, though, he doesn't, and it's a weird phrase to use, but he doesn't "share" himself.

But I like him! It's hard not to like him. But when you just attack everything with reason and follow it up with a couple of rude comments, I'm not sure that's funny to me. For example, I agree with everything Gervais says about fat people and I've thought a lot of those things myself, but I think that my own sense of humor prefers absurdity to reason.

To illustrate this, I'm going to share a couple more clips, one of Ricky Gervais talking about fat people and Louis CK talking about his family and a trip to the drug store. Compare reason with absurdity and see if you agree.





Yes, it's apples to oranges, but can you see the difference in styles and understand what I mean? The Gervais routine is amusing, but lacks the teeth of the Louis CK routine. Gervais is irritated, but Louis is livid. Gervais is talking about other people, but Louis is talking about himself. Gervais is dealing with reason, but Louis CK is vending absurdity. And while I enjoyed Ricky Gervais, I thought Louis CK was incredibly funny.

Granted, when you explain why something is funny it stops being funny, so maybe I should leave it right there.