Tell me I'm wrong, bro: Gervais calls out Hollywood, and man, was it deviously awkward

Ricky Gervais

Even at their best, neither Bruce Lee nor Chuck Norris ever eviscerated anyone quite like Ricky Gervais did. 

Bruce and Chuck were masters of martial arts. 

Gervais was simply the master of ceremony at Sunday's Golden Globes awards. 

The British actor/comedian, never a popular guy in Hollywood anyway (he's seen as too mean-spirited, I guess), stood in front of the A-list crowd and attacked its hypocrisy with the surgical precision of a Kung Fu master ripping a man's heart out of his chest, then showing it to him before he dies (like Bruce Lee himself). 


Gervais, definitely more left-wing than right, had the Hollywood hoi polloi squirming with a monolog that targeted them and not President Donald Trump, certainly a more palatable aiming point, at least in their eyes. 


Surely this crowd is used to showing up for its various award shows and -- all together, now!  -- hearing joke after joke leveled at Trump and other conservatives. Some of those are funny, though most are pretty predictable. Still, it's not as though it takes guts for one Hollywood type to stand in front of a bunch of others and sling darts at Trump (looking at you, Alec Baldwin and the Saturday Night Live gang). 

Try not doing that at an awards show and see what happens ... 

Aaaaaand, we're back to Gervais, who touched on all the taboo subjects, like pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, a well-known friend of Hollywood who recently took his own life while in jail awaiting a federal indictment for sex trafficking. Epstein is alleged to have hanged himself in his Manhattan jail cell, but there is reason to suspect it wasn't a suicide, which is what Gervais was getting at with the following joke about hit Netflix series Afterlife:

"This show should just be me coming out going, 'Well done Netflix, you win everything. Good night.' But no, no. We've got to drag it out for three hours. You could binge-watch the entire first season of Afterlife instead of watching this show. That's a show about a man who wants to kill himself because his wife dies of cancer and it's still more fun than this, OK? Spoiler alert: Season two is on the way so in the end he obviously didn't kill himself. Just like Jeffrey Epstein."

The Epstein joke elicited a couple of chuckles, but they were quickly overtaken by groans. And those groans eventually turned into winces when Gervais fired off a joke about journalist Ronan Farrow, who ignited Hollywood's "Me too" movement after he detailed the sexual assault allegations leveled at movie executive Harvey Weinstein.

"In this room are some of the most important TV and film executives in the world. People from every background. But they all have one thing in common: They're all terrified of Ronan Farrow. He's coming from you, he's coming for you."

God bless him, the great Tom Hanks probably didn't want to get caught laughing too hard at Ricky Gervais' sizzling barbs, so he wound up making this face and, well, it went viral.

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Those jokes were certainly, in a word "edgy" but I suppose my greatest delight came when he came out and lowered the boom on Hollywood's "woke" culture. I love the expression, and if I weren't so darn pure myself, I'd try to convince you I came up with it. 

You know "woke" don't you? If you're woke, well, you're in a splendid place because it means you've been awakened to the real atrocities of our nasty, troubling world. Not that there aren't real atrocities -- look at me starting to wake up, huh? -- but if you're really woke, you're tuned in to the current cause celebre. 

When Gervais targeted Hollywood hypocrisy, he did so in much the same way one of those un-woke, uneducated southern redneck fishermen (disgusting Trump-loving bastards) go after a largemouth bass: He set his hook. With Apple CEO Tim Cook sitting right there, Gervais first praised the tech giant's foray into the streaming TV game, then he went all William Tell with it ...    

“Apple roared into the TV game with The Morning Show, a superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing, made by a company that runs sweatshops in China. You say you’re woke, but the companies you work for, I mean, unbelievable: Apple, Amazon, Disney. If ISIS started a streaming service, you’d call your agent, wouldn’t you?” 

Ouch! 

Although, let's be honest, that last part, about ISIS starting a streaming service and Hollywood types calling their agents? The joke falls a little flat there, only because woke actors and actresses already see ISIS as more tolerable than a Trump-led America (regardless of your political views, that take is just stupid ... and sleepy).

Gervais followed that with a scud aimed at those woke folk who long for the opportunity to lecture regular souls like you and me, most of whom dwell paycheck-to-paycheck in the flyover parts of the country. And I think that, in large part, is why his monolog resonated with us. Me? Well, I've got enough to worry about without listening to Hollywood types, whose lavish lifestyles basically mocks my own, tell me I'm a terrible person because I'm not as in tune with humanity as they are. 

I hate the lecturing, and my guess is, on at least some level, you do too. And it's not that I'm unsympathetic to the world view, it's that I have to juggle my sympathies with an everyday life that doesn't include, you know, a yacht and a private plane. Gervais, I think, understands this, which is why he "encouraged" the multi-millionaire celeb elites to spare the rest of us their shameful tongue clucking. 

"If you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a political platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. ... So, if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your God and f*** off. Okay?"

Yes, he said a naughty word there at the end. Oops, sorry. I certainly understand that some might be offended by it, and that's okay because your feelings are your own, and I'm not here to, you know, lecture you about them. I will, however, point out that I saw a couple of media outlets refer to Gervais' monolog as -- gasp! -- "profanity" laden, like profanity is hilarious in Hollywood movies, but damn it! (er, dang it), if it's used in calling out the A-list muckety-mucks it's just perverse. 

Finally, I need to offer something of a caveat here. I know that Gervais' Golden Globes performance gained quite a bit of traction with conservatives and in right-wing media. But as I noted earlier, Gervais isn't exactly Margaret Thatcher. He's more of a old school liberal, so I smirk at how he has become a conservative rally cry. Believe me, I'm always smirky (entertained, perhaps?) at the way zealots on either side make too much of anything.

I suppose I don't see eye-to-eye with Gervais on everything, but he and I are, I think, aligned in the belief that the Hollywood elites need to take a good, long look in the mirror (not that they don't do that all the time, but you get what I'm saying). And, lest anyone forget, he was practicing comedy, which often shines the light of truth through exaggeration. 

I also tend to think Gervais and I agree on this, too: Today's Hollywood libs are actually really crappy libs. I mean, they suck at it. The liberalism they espouse -- ditto for many Washington Democrats/liberals -- is much closer to 1950s conservatism than it is 60s freedom movement-type stuff. The lecturing? The endless offense-taking? The closed mindedness and willingness to ban ideas they don't like or deem incorrect? C'mon, bro! 

Get woke!