It’s frustrating, because what Gervais seems to think he’s doing would actually make for a pretty good show. Arguably the joke here is that Gervais is playing off the idea that people think he’s sexist, like he’s saying it in character, but he doesn’t give it time to breathe long enough before jumping to justify it, so it’s really just a contextless, sexist statement. It’s a way of satirising attitudes.”īut that isn’t really how comedy works, is it? Comedy works by exploiting or subverting shared known premises, not just by “saying the wrong thing” so that people can laugh at the opposite, whatever that means. “That’s when I say something I don’t really mean for comic effect, and you as an audience, you laugh at the ‘wrong’ thing because you know what the right thing is. He makes a not-great joke about how there are no good female comedians, but then claims that the joke is really just a way to demonstrate the way his comedy is intended to operate. One of the first things Gervais does is try to provide himself with a bulletproof defence against exactly the kind of reactions the show is designed to elicit.
