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terastalungrad · 30 days

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Sometimes, you’re a comedian with a touring show to promote, so you do an interview with a regional newspaper.

I think that’d be the funniest possible time to reveal a big scoop, wouldn’t it?

Stewart Lee is currently touring, and to promote his Yeovil performance, gave an interview to Blackmore Vale Magazine. According to Wikipedia, the Blackmore Vale is an area of north Dorset, south Somerset and southwest Wiltshire. According to the comedian Jake Baker, the magazine would cover his school sports day as he grew up in Dorset. That’s the level of news you’d expect.

The questions are friendly and easy, from a journalist clearly familiar with Lee’s work and history.

The first question is about the show’s angle. Lee describes the nature of the show, and here’s an excerpt:

So it looks like stand-up, and sounds like stand-up, but it’s actually a kind of character piece about a desperate person who’s frightened and trying to organise the world in a way that puts them in control. And I guess you could argue that’s what a lot of stand-ups are doing anyway. Ricky Gervais to me looks like a very frightened man. He’s frightened of transgender people coming after him, the act is a defensive wall.

Fun! This is a Ricky Gervais hate blog, so it’s nice to see a sudden, unexpected attack in an unrelated promotional interview.

Lee mentions Gervais again in response to question four.

Sometimes I become bitter and think ‘I get all this good press, why can’t I get 10 million quid for a TV special like Ricky Gervais?’ But on the other hand, I wouldn’t want that audience, it wouldn’t allow me to be better.

And then again to question eight, where Lee explains why he spends six months running new shows in the relatively small Leicester Square Theatre (as opposed to arena comics who might do 10 warmup shows followed by 60 tour dates).

You can still run it like a club gig, you can interact with people in real time. Also, you wouldn’t get better at the show because you wouldn’t have done it as many times. You can see this with an act like Gervais. Those shows have not been run in, they’re not fluid, they’re a succession of inflexible statements that would snap like twigs if the pressure of an unforeseen event was applied to them.

The journalist finally addresses this head on. It really is worth reading the entire article - there’s a lot more than I’m quoting, including an interesting story about Sean Lock:

But here are my favourite bits:

[Gervais] still kind of copies me though, which is the weird thing. There’s still a lot of cadences of what I do but they’re used in the service of evil. In Star Wars, he’s Darth Vader and he’s taken the force, which is me, and used it for evil purposes. He was a fanboy, he was actually the booker at University of London and used to book me and Sean Lock all the time. And when he became famous for the Office, he wrote an hour-long act that was so indebted to us it was awkward. [...] If he’d come up through the circuit that would have been rubbed off him because you find your own voice doing club gigs. It took me two years of gigging five nights a week to come through the mesh of things I liked. But he didn’t have that experience in the same way. [...] Funnily enough, in his first show there were bits I’d never recorded that he’d do almost verbatim. He’d clearly remembered them. I went to see him at the Bloomsbury – on his invitation actually – with my then girlfriend and she was very concerned for me. I’d given up at that point due to lack of interest, and she was concerned for what it felt like to see my act being done to hundreds of people, it was quite weird. On the other hand, that sort of did make me think I don’t want it to be consumed into someone else’s vocabulary. And also, I think because he had a residual sense of guilt, he would always credit me in interviews as being an influence – that helped me in 2004 to get the audience back.

This is, to my knowledge, the first time Lee’s ever claimed that Gervais stole his material. He’s certainly talked about Gervais clearly taking influence from him (though in the past, he downplayed this compared to the account given in this interview).

It’s a pretty big thing to accuse a comic of stealing material. That’s a big taboo. I reckon this is partly because Lee wants to discourage fans of Gervais from coming to the show.

Anyway, let’s finish by quoting the end of the interview:

It must be strange to have that level of financial remuneration and those audience figures but not really a single good review. And I expect what that does for you is create a cognitive dissonance where you have to manufacture a worldview by which the whole world is wrong and you’re right. Which can’t necessarily be very good for your mental health, although I expect the money’s nice.

#stewart lee #ricky gervais #tagging my hate

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 13 days

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This is atheism in a nutshell: one person says, "there's a god." An atheist says, "can you prove that?" They say, "no." The atheist says "I don't believe you."

That's it. That's all it is.

You see, if you took every holy book, every holy book there's ever been, every religious book, every bits of spirituality and hid them or destroyed them, okay, they went away. Then you took every science book and destroyed that, in a thousand years' time, those science books would be back, exactly the same. Because the tests would always turn out the same.

Those religious books would either never exist or they'd be totally different. Because there's no test.

#Ricky Gervais #atheism #religion #religion is a mental illness #science #science vs religion #religion vs science

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cosmonautroger · 2 months

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After Life, 2016

#After Life #2016 #Ricky Gervais

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psykopaths · 2 months

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#thankfully no one can read my thoughts #ricky gervais #dark humor #relatable memes #relatable #3 am thoughts #thoughts #spilled thoughts #stand up #comedian

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gnnosis · 11 months

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love, of all sorts / wherever you are

[ “home,” edward sharpe and the magnetic zeros / everything everywhere all at once (2022) / afterlife 1x04 / ted lasso 3x12 / greywaren, maggie stiefvater / succession 4x10 / “francesca,” hozier / dead poets society (1989) / “queers” (bbc), alan cumming / “i carry your heart with me,” ee cummings ]

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always-rolling-my-eyes · 4 months

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The Stand Up Comedy nominees

#golden globes 2024 #golden globes #ricky gervais #trevor noah #chris rock #amy schumer #sarah silverman #wanda sykes

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queenie-official · 1 year

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biggest scam of this movie is having the entire plot surrounding Ahkmenrah, and Rami Malek still having barely any lines 😭😭 let that pretty boy speak 😤

#ahkmenrah #night at the museum #rami malek #rami malek night at the museum #ben stiller #owen wilson #ricky gervais #ahkmenrah x female reader #ahkmenrah x reader #ahkmenrah x male reader #natm #natm 2

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fez-pwned · 1 month

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bully him

#karl pilkington #the ricky gervais show fanart #the ricky gervais show #ricky gervais #stephen merchant

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terastalungrad · 2 years

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There's a certain type of comedian who thinks they're the main character of life, and that the most important angle on any issue is what THEY think of it. Whether that's their take on the latest MCU film, or their observations on politics.

You can't understand these people until you realise they think they're modern-day philosophers. And they're not. Philosophers are modern-day philosophers.

I do believe comedians are primarily for entertainment. The fact that we can say something meaningful is great but bonus.

For thousands of years, there have been people who don't fit their culture's dominant model of gender. Bigots will try and convince you that this is NEW, and that it's a problem in some way. Don't believe them. Don't be gullible.

Comedians who see themselves as the protagonist? They're gullible. They swallow the dominant narrative wholesale, because they won't do the work to try and understand anyone else's perspective. Why would they? They're the main character. These comedians often seemed ground-breaking when they were young, because this single-minded self-obsession helped them reject old-fashioned values.

But as they get older, the same condition causes them to reject emerging progressive values.

They think they're cool. Arguing with Mary Whitehouse was cool in their 20s. They think it looks the same when they're in their 50s and arguing with 19-year-olds. They like it when you're offended, because they think it's cool to offend people.

So here's a secret. Comedians don't CARE if they've hurt your feelings. That makes them feel powerful. Instead, talk about how old-fashioned they are. Oh, what a shame, they've failed to keep up with the times. Gutted. They seemed so exciting 20 years ago.

"You're not funny" doesn't hurt a comedian. They believe they're funny because every night, rooms full of strangers laugh at them. Comedians don't crave validation for how funny they are. They crave validation for how INTERESTING they are.

How do you kill a comedian?

Aim for their relevance.

#ricky gervais #dave chappelle #tagging my hate

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thatstormygeek · 4 months

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A responsible press would either decide that whatever real backlash there is to a comedian’s special isn’t newsworthy; if it is newsworthy, it would cover it through the frame of engaging with whatever specific criticisms there are, not knee-jerk “free speech” framing despite lack of a “free speech” issue. But we do not have a responsible press. We have a press that loves chaos and controversy. We have a press that frames everything as a “culture war,” in which two equally valid sides score points. So they love this stuff. The result of this is a slew of comedians who pose as far more edgy than they actually are.

But at the risk of stating the obvious, the fact that the world’s biggest comedians are getting paid massive amounts of money by some of the most powerful companies in media to record these variations on the same jokes that others have told for years already… should probably lead us to tap the brakes on the “OooOoOoh, they’re so edgy!” claims.

The whole piece is so good (and if you hit the paywall and want more, I have a handful of 3 month subscriptions I can share), but I also wanted to put a spotlight on this comment because it really cuts through some bullshit: