I Never Found Ricky Gervais Funny
Who’s laughing now?
The first time I saw an episode of The Office (the original BBC version), I was sitting with my university flatmates after dinner in our shared lounge. The whole 30 minutes was an ordeal. I’m not a fan of humour that makes you cringe, like if it’s gonna make me feel uncomfortable, let’s at least a) make it funny, and b) make it have a point. Recreating the bullshit I have to deal with for 8 hours a day and then magnifying it by a factor of ten is just a bit traumatic and unnecessary, really. Observational comedy isn’t meant to be an exercise in stenography; there needs to be some actual observations rather than just a running commentary. Where is the wit in simply regurgitating what we all know and hate without any particular angle on it?
The humour wasn’t so much subtle as horrifically forced. But apparently I was missing something (like what?). The only mirth I took from it was at Gervais & co’s strained efforts to make this doomed thing work. Every week we could tune in for another installment of scriptwriters and actors pushed to the absolute limit trying to make the terminally unfunny funny. It’s not particularly clever to make the banal look banal or to meta the shit out of hackneyed commentary on hackneyed commentary. Where is the lesson in this? Off-camera, Gervais comes across more like his awful boss character (David…
