It’s highly offensive, but that’s not the problem with Ricky Gervais’ Armageddon

There’s a little sinking feeling that hits when, in the first couple of minutes of Ricky Gervais’s latest stand-up special Armageddon, he cracks out the word “woke”.

There’s something about that word: it tends to act as a signal that what follows is going to be some hard-right reactionary old-man-shouting-at-clouds tedium. Which is exactly what Gervais’s most strident critics expect from him, of course.

Ricky Gervais in Armageddon.

His previous special, Supernature, drew strong criticism for his jokes about trans issues, and for seeming to cross a line between ‘I don’t care who I offend’ to ‘I enjoy offending people’.

Armageddon, presently the number 1 show on Netflix in Australia, is arguably not as provocative as Supernature. But there does still seem to be an attempt to court controversy from a man who has proved himself invincible to cancel culture despite being high on the list of what might be termed problematic celebrities.

This doesn’t mean it’s as funny as Gervais can be, his focus in Armageddon seems to be on being edgy, rather than being hilarious.

Gervais’ musings on “woke” do not descend to Fox News-level lefty-baiting, and his mockery of those who might occasionally be tagged with that epithet is for the most part amusing enough.

But the very fact he pulls out such a tired, played-out term is suggestive of a certain lack of sharpness: a little laziness of thought that does not permeate the special, but does occasionally seep in, to the show’s overall detriment.

The show is not, thank goodness, all about wokeness, though Gervais’ delight in poking fun at modern sensitivities is always evident. His main subject, as usual, is the arrogance and stupidity of the human race, whether that takes the form of ludicrous cultural policing of movies, petty fixations on language, or our species’ peculiarly hubristic march to self-destruction – as hinted in the show’s title.

There are superb bits on humans’ tendency to overlook what’s important in favour of their own narrow obsessions – a sequence on a website’s monitoring of animal cruelty in Schindler’s List leads to some big laughs. Gervais is also quite happy to include himself in the mass of humanity at which he takes aim, and many of those who have absorbed a social media-based view of the man might be surprised at the level of self-awareness his comedy possesses.

At less inspired moments, however, there’s a sense that the star started with an idea to piss someone off, and worked backward to find a joke. Jokes about paedophilia and disability are clearly written with no concern for anyone’s feelings, which is no problem in itself, but you may find yourself wishing he’d edited his script more with an eye to maximum comedic impact rather than cheering his own willingness to offend quite so much.

Then again, the normal province of the stand-up is to rant about what irritates them, and people who are too sensitive to jokes really do irritate Ricky Gervais. Like his other specials, Armageddon is punctuated by asides on the nature and the purpose of humour, and frustration that the world is too full of people who take jokes both too literally and too seriously.

Previously Gervais has been pilloried in particular for his material on the transgender community, and even while he revels in the anger of his critics and the notoriety it affords him, it obviously does still rankle him to some extent that his jokes have been seen as harmful, particularly when contrasted with other problems of the world.

There are no rants on gender in this special, but the odd mention crops up, seemingly more as a nod to what he sees as the absurdity of past criticisms than anything particularly related to the subject at hand.

It is, to some extent, a fool’s errand to review a stand-up comedy show, because it is a self-reviewing artform. When you get on stage and tell jokes, the audience will either laugh or they won’t, and that reaction makes anything a critic can say kind of irrelevant.

He’s one of the world’s most successful stand-ups, and no matter how much that might rankle with some, it gives him pretty much the perfect riposte to any critic.

Nevertheless, from someone who’s been a diehard fan of everything Gervais has done for a couple of decades, Armageddon feels like a piece of work unworthy of its creator’s great talents. There are plenty of laughs, but they just don’t seem as plentiful, or as memorable, as they have been in the past. If Gervais has begun to rest on his laurels, after all he’s achieved, you might not blame him, but as he finishes his set with some trademark “but seriously” material, the feeling that the blade, if not entirely dulled, could use some sharpening before the next outing, is inescapable.

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