On Monday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the Daily Wire editor-in-chief talks about Ricky Gervais’ best jokes at the Golden Globes, and Hollywood’s reaction. Video and partial transcript below:
Ricky Gervais’ final joke [at the Golden Globes] was the best joke — he was so irritated with the whole process and it was quite wonderful. He is talking here about the movies that have been nominated in the horror category, I believe, he’s talking about “Bird Box,” and he just levels Hollywood. It’s fantastic.
GERVAIS: Netflix’s “Bird Box,” a movie where people survive by acting like they don’t see a thing. So, like working for Harvey Weinstein — You did it. I didn’t, you did it.
You can hear people like “Ohhhh.” What are you “ohh-ing” about? He’s right, you did it, you pieces of crap. You’re the ones who spent 30 years taking Harvey Weinstein’s checks while allowing him to peek down your blouse, and/or allowing him to peek down other people’s blouses. Then some of you come forward — again, I have nothing but sympathy for the women who have actually come forward — but there are a bunch of women who didn’t come forward and/or protected Harvey Weinstein knowing that he did this stuff, or he did it to them and then they came out and protected him for years because he was signing checks to them.
Hollywood does not get to stand on its high horse about MeToo, Hollywood does not get to stand on its high horse about global warming. Honestly, the only person who was even decent in these political speeches last night was Joaquin Phoenix, got played off the stage when he suggested that people in Hollywood stopped taking private jets everywhere. Joaquin Phoenix may be a nut, but at least he’s a nut who’s trying to hold himself to a standard.
Ricky Gervais’s hit on Hollywood, it does underscore what our politics truly is about these days, because it really is not about the complexity of politics. It really is about this cultural divide.
The culture wars have become extremely hard fought now, a lot more hard fought in the last 20 years — 25 years — than they were for many decades before that. Why? Well, culture is usually the last vestige of unity. So when you have a common philosophy, culture, history, then culture tends to be the easiest place to unify because you can argue about TV or argue about sports really, and argue about like the products that you’re wearing — that’s the stuff that’s easy.
The stuff that’s hard is philosophy and history and all the stuff that undergirds a successful civilization. But when all of those other things fall away and the last thing that we can unify about is culture, and then culture starts to be polarized, we end up in these culture wars we’re fighting. You can see with each successive Oscars, each successive Golden Globes, you can see that Hollywood is exacerbating those Culture Wars and Ricky Gervais just put a pin in it last night. I mean, he really just exposed it — ripped it wide open.
He made another joke that I don’t think we actually had a chance to pull where he was talking about the Woke nature of Hollywood, and he was saying that he was gonna do an “In Memoriam” segment last night, but he saw that there are too many dead white people. So he said, “I’m not going to do that. That’s not diverse enough. I’m not going to be the one who does that,” and people in the audience didn’t know whether to laugh or not, because what he is laughing at is their ridiculous insistence that every single part has to be given to a person who is of the actual physical description in the script.
So if it’s a disabled person, it can’t be a person who is non-disabled playing a disabled person — which is called acting. He’s laughing at the fact that Hollywood has declared that the only way that they can find some sort of moral recompense for what they do is by hiring a certain percentage of black or gay or female actors, and that you have to have a certain percentage of black or female or gay lines in a particular script in order to make that script morally praiseworthy.
Ricky Gervais is right about all this. Hollywood has been at the forefront of the Culture Wars and then they declared themselves on the defensive. “Oh, how dare these right-wingers like Trump, they’re always involved in the Culture Wars.” You launched it, Trump is just responding, so is the rest of America and Gervais — Honestly, like people on the Right were cheering last night — Gervais is not a Republican.
I’ve seen no evidence that Gervais is conservative 0r Republican. He just has eyes, that’s all. He has eyes, and he has a brain, and so he can see how ridiculous these people in Hollywood are, and they are ridiculous pretending to be our moral betters. Just absurdity.
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