Shockingly, Hollywood Didn't Love Ricky Gervais' Golden Globes Jokes
There’s only one thing that can hold a flickering candle to the fun of watching Ricky Gervais deliver his trademark uncomfortable comedy while most of Hollywood squirms in their seats, awkwardly not knowing how to react while he calls them out on their hypocrisy, political lecturing and Jeffrey Epstein. And that’s hearing the shocked reaction of the Hollywood press, outraged that anyone would dare call out these pure, incorruptible, pious, venerated godlike celebrities.
Slate – Going into the Golden Globes, the biggest question was not who will win the night’s biggest awards but how much of a jerk Ricky Gervais would be. … On occasion, Gervais does genuinely speak truth to power, but much of the time he’s just, well, being kind of a dick.
LA Times – Forget the escapist magic of Hollywood. Nihilism was the name of the game when host Ricky Gervais opened the Golden Globes on Sunday night with a gloom-and-doom monologue so cynical it made the effervescent Tom Hanks scowl. …
“No one cares about movies anymore,” and advised, “If you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world.”
Meryl Streep shook her head. Eddie Murphy refused to smile. Quentin Tarantino looked more disturbed than usual. …
The last thing anyone needed was for the smirking master of ceremonies to reprimand them for having hope, or taunt the room for trying to use their influence to change things for the better.
IndieWire – Women and Hollywood’s Melissa Silverstein responded critically to Gervais’ joke, writing on social media, “The lack of women directors in the industry is no joke. The top 100 films of 2019 were helmed by a total of 113 directors, 89.4 percent of whom were male and 10.6 percent of whom were female.”
Variety’s Ramin Setoodeh was in the room at the Golden Globes ceremony and tweeted, “No one laughed during that terrible joke about women directors from Ricky Gervais.”
Hollywood Reporter – My gracious, some of Gervais’ jokes were stale. Not even stale — calcified. Not even calcified — turned to freaking petrified wood.
A joke about William H. Macy being in Wild Hogs? Tackling those sacred cows! (This was preceded by an OK Felicity Huffman/license plate joke. Not a great Felicity Huffman/license plate joke, but if such a thing exists, I’m waiting to hear it.) …
Are we going to pretend that “Leonardo DiCaprio dates hot young models” jokes are really going to cause Gervais future difficulties in Hollywood? …
At the Golden Globes, it’s OK for the jokes to hurt a little, but not too much.
Comedy is the most subjective thing in the world. It’s completely unquantifiable. Not only is what’s funny to you not necessarily funny to me, the same thing might not have been funny to you if you heard it five minutes earlier. But you know how you can tell when a joke landed perfectly? When the people you’re ridiculing are throwing their wrists across their foreheads and fainting at the sheer horror of it all. And the sycophants in the access media are offended on their behalf. That’s how.
Another way to tell is that the best jokes have some truth in them. Even the ones that are not necessarily jokes. And nothing ever said on stage at an awards show was ever truer than Gervais telling these people, “please don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg. So if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your God and fuck off.”
Fucking brilliant.
The public is done with being lectured to from millionaires who playact the words and emotions of fictional characters created by smarter people. We’ve reached our limit of being educated on social justice by women wearing $500,000 necklaces of Blood Diamonds given to them for free. We are all set with DiCaprio winning an Oscar for a forgettable movie where he swam in frozen rivers and screamed for three hours, nagging us about our carbon footprint, then hopping a private jet to party with Hawaiian Tropic models on one of the world’s biggest yachts.
Remember when Viola Davis won an Oscar for playing Denzel’s wife in something, then looked the world straight in the eye and said the film industry is the only occupation that “celebrates a life”? Yeah, up yours, pediatric nurses! Get over yourselves, first responders! Fuck off, cancer researchers! The star of “Suicide Squad” is here to settle your hash on the whole life celebration thing.
And if you needed any further proof of what monumental hypocrites the Beautiful People are, just check out how quickly and loudly the “time’s up” music came to cut off Joaquin Phoenix once he started telling them to give up the private jets:
Sorry, Joker. Ever try sexually assaulting one of Harvey Weinstein’s assistants while flying coach? Not happening.
So Ricky Gervais is exactly what the genre needs right now. He’s an equal opportunity offender who offends the people who deserve offending. Our preachy, holier-than-thou, self-righteous betters hate him, and that’s good enough for me. When I become Jerry I, the absolute ruler of the Kingdom of Thorntopia, I’m putting him in charge of hosting every awards show on TV.