British comedian Ricky Gervais won global infamy for his merciless opening speech at the 2020 Golden Globes . The dry eight-minute routine decried woke hypocrisy, confronted Hollywood's pedophilia problem, and ridiculed the notion of elites passing each other awards. It is a skit that hasn't aged a day.
Now Gervais is back in the spotlight for his Netflix special SuperNature. Once again, he appears to be upsetting all the right people.
The segment to have drawn the most ire is an uproarious takedown of the "logic" behind transgenderism and the intolerant march of its pronouns into every facet of our lives.
Gervais begins by feigning boredom with "old fashioned women... you know, the ones with wombs".
"I love the new women. They're great, aren't they?" he announces. "The ones with beards and ..." Well, be warned, Gervais is coarse. But it wasn't his rough language that upset the liberal establishment.
Vox managed to find not only transphobia in the Gervais special but also violence, white supremacy, Sinophobia and (gasp) even commonalities with the dangerous TERF ideology of J.K. Rowling.
Vox's central concern is that by targeting the trans issue, Gervais is "punching down": a famous comedian exploiting his status to mock the already-marginalised.
If Gervais' routine went after specific trans people, Vox might have a case. But that is not what happened.
Vox's argument would likewise hold water if the LGBT juggernaut didn't have a stranglehold on every institution in Western society. Alas, it does. Gervais is punching up. And that is precisely why he is funny.
Gervais is funny, moreover, because he states the obvious in a time when stating the obvious is verboten - and is costing people their careers, civil liberties and sanity. Our laughter at Gervais' trans routine is not so much laughter as it is a sigh of relief that the sky, after all, really is blue.
All the shiny magazines and digital newspapers can trumpet their disapproval but Gervais will remain humorous to the deplorables.
Proof of this is that the critics at Rotten Tomatoes gave SuperNature a score of 14% but its audience is unruffled, awarding Gervais 92%.
(It's worth noting that Rotten Tomatoes critics rated Cuties at 86% while its audience punished the film with a 16% rating for venturing too far into the child porn genre).
Talk about out-of-touch elites. Golden Globes eat your heart out.
As a Christian, I find many of Gervais' other SuperNature jokes distasteful - even if I can still see the funny side to them.
In a time when wokeness threatens to bury comedy altogether, the world needs comedians like Ricky Gervais. It's either that or the fulfilment of G.K. Chesterton's eerie prophecy:
"We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green."
On second thoughts, we may already be living in Chesterton's world.