In the lead-up to his return as host of the Golden Globe Awards, comedian Ricky Gervais ripped woke culture’s ruination of comedy by refusing to back down from making jokes it has deemed taboo.
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter (THR), Gervais addressed the intense Twitter backlash he has faced in recent days for making jokes at the expense of transgender activists. Most recently, he jokingly responded to a satirical article from Jarvis Dupont, sarcastically blasting biological women upset over transgenders using their bathrooms and taking over their sports.
“Those awful biological women can never understand what it must be like for you becoming a lovely lady so late in life,” Gervais said on Twitter. “They take their girly privileges for granted. Winning at female sports and having their own toilets. Well, enough is enough.”
Gervais later told THR that he was simply playing along with Jarvis Dupont’s persona of taking woke to an illogical extreme, arguing that his critics were angered by the fact he dared to make a joke about a touchy subject.
“I’m taking the p*ss out of Jarvis Dupont, who is actually a woman in real life. And this is the problem. You can say, ‘Listen, I was joking. It’s a joke.’ But that’s not always enough for people. They go, ‘Well, why were you joking?’ Also, add to that the nature of Twitter — it’s so curt, there’s no nuance, it’s there forever out of context,” Gervais said.
When THR pressed Gervais as to why he would engage in that kind of joke in the first place, the comedian said that some people would say it’s better not to engage in such jokes strictly due to fear. “For an easy life, it’s better not to,” he said.
On the issue of woke culture destroying comedy, a subject that “Joker” director Todd Phillips publicly lamented in recent months, Gervais said the onslaught of such purity results from a dislike for freedom of speech.
People like the idea of freedom of speech until they hear something they don’t like. So there’s still a pressure, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to water it down or back down and not say what I want. It’s just another form of what we’ve been through many, many times — it used to be called P.C. I think those things start off with very good intention and then they’re mugged. It’s a good thing to not be racist and sexist and homophobic. But it’s not a good thing to not be allowed to make jokes about those things, because you can tell a joke about race without being racist. I’m happy to play by the rules. It’s just that the 200 million people watching have different rules. That’s the plight. When people say, “He crossed the line,” I say, “I didn’t draw a line, you did.” It’s relative. It’s subjective.
When THR pressed Gervais on the issue of transphobia, he outright denied having no animosity against transgender individuals, and simply wanted to make a point about people holding up taboo subjects as a sacred cow.
“Some people, when you deal with contentious issues or taboo subjects, the very mention of them is the sacrilege,” said Gervais. “That’s why they stay taboo. People straight away, particularly with a comedian, if you’re joking about a subject, they think you’re anti it as opposed to pro it.”
Ricky Gervais faced heat for criticizing radical transgender activist Jessica Yaniv, who filed suit against a beauty parlor in Canada for refusing to wax his genitals. When news broke that he would return to host the Golden Globes, IndieWire argued that Gervais’ past transgender jokes warrant cancelation.