Duncan Lay: ‘We need more people like Ricky Gervais in this world’

I HATE and admire the way Ricky Gervais explains in his latest comedy special, Humanity, why he doesn’t want to have children, Duncan Lay writes.

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I HATE and admire the way Ricky Gervais explains in his latest comedy special, Humanity, why he doesn’t want to have children.

I admire him for his principles but I hate it because there’s a need for more Ricky Gervaises in this world.

He’s not just funny, he’s a comedy genius. He’s also a tireless worker for charity and champions free speech.

We need as many people like that as possible.

Instead, we get thousands of David Brents, his self-deluded character from The Office. David Brents, as far as the eye can see, all of them breeding away furiously.

Ricky Gervais talks about why he doesn’t have children in his Netflix comedy Humanity.

I hope you’re not eating breakfast with that image in your mind.

It reminds me of the film Idiocracy, where an ordinary man is cryogenically frozen and wakes up in the year 2505 to find humanity has descended into idiocy because only stupid people were having children.

Too many intelligent people — such as Gervais — were making a rational decision not to bring children into this troubled world.

The result was you had to be both a star of reality TV and having sex with a porn star to be elected president of America. Luckily that will never happen in real life …

The stories I hear of what is happening in our schools scare me. Too many kids are being raised who don’t care about others and are happy to achieve nothing.

They don’t care if they hurt others because there are no consequences for them.

There need to be more people like comedy genius Ricky Gervais, Duncan Lay writes. Picture: Paul Drinkwater/NBCUniversal

They are idiots not because they are stupid but because they are destructive.

Now I’m not saying you need to pass an IQ test to become a parent.

Intelligent people aren’t necessarily wonderful and stupid people aren’t necessarily bad.

For that we just have to look at some more of Ricky Gervais’s work — the series Derek. Its hero is simple-minded but good-hearted.

A world full of Dereks would be an infinitely better place. A world full of David Brents is a horrifying prospect.

Asking people to fight back against the wave of idiocy by having children seems ridiculous. So maybe the answer is for all of us to teach tomorrow’s generation to be kinder, more thoughtful and less selfish. Then it doesn’t matter how smart they are.

Or is that just a stupid idea?